


guided by confused light

by burnsidesjulia



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Bonds, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Character Study, F/M, First Meetings, Fist Fights, Governor Kalen Sucks, Memory Loss, Pre-Canon, The Light of Creation - Freeform, i do several hits on magnus
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-05-23 07:26:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 40,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14929832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burnsidesjulia/pseuds/burnsidesjulia
Summary: On a day well into his twenty-first year, Magnus notices a string that shoots from his chest upward, spiraling neatly into the sky. It disappears well beyond the place where he can see.or, an au in which Magnus can see the lights of bonds, and they guide him.to an extent, that is.





	1. magnus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (super big thanx to everqueen on ao3 for being real chill about the fact that i also wrote a visible bonds au. woohoo)

It’s a string of light that leads him to that dog.

Magnus knows the lights well. They string close between two blades of grass, encircle the hands of a passing couple on the street, float in hovering ringlets between the fingers of a bard and her guitar. They glow brightly around his mother’s soft, gently creased face, softer around his father’s stern grip but equally beautiful. And it’s one of these lights that seemingly only he can perceive that leads him to that particular field, at that particular moment, to that particular dog.

He’s headed home. He’s been out all day, wandering about, chasing ducks at a nearby pond. Magnus loves ducks. He loves all animals, but ducks in particular. He imagines flying one day - despite it being a silly, childish dream and him being _ten_ and _basically_ a grown up - to soar through the sky, for all that lovely light that floats up there to encase and embrace him. Because the thing is, Magnus sees his own strings of lights, too. His own little connections are clear as day, ones connecting him to terriers passing on the streets, to his friends. He has several that string him up to the sky, to clouds shaped like ice cream cones and birds that pass overhead. He sees the strings between ducks floating near each other in the pond and watches the reflection dance bright on the water. He’s headed home, but then there’s this bright string, headed sharply left.

Magnus pauses. That’s the way to the forest.

He wonders, for a moment, if it’s one of his friends out galavanting about. They do that, you know, playing pretend soldiers and wizards, casting cantrips without their parents’ permission. But he knows their strings are all different, specific: this one wobbles slightly to the left, this one hangs low to the ground. He doesn’t know what it is, but he knows that he can, without fail, trust the strings of light. They introduced him to his best friend Huxley, after all.

So dutifully, he follows it.

As he approaches, he can hear yelps, and his flight response kicks in. Magnus is not big nor strong - his mother promises he will be one day, but he’s rather doubtful - and so he worries if there’s trouble that he’ll be the only one around to help. But this string is still bouncing along the path, about waist height and shimmering. It’s all he knows to follow it.

He sees the dog when he’s about thirty feet from the half circle gathered around it. He doesn’t recognize the boys, and if he did he’d flee right back the way he came and alert their parents, but he surely recognizes cruelty when he sees it. Magnus can also recognize a problem when he sees it, and he can see that there’s three boys to his one Magnus, each of them bigger than him. Still he spreads his shoulders wide and approaches.

“Hey!”

Three pairs of eyes turn to him. Two are elvish boys, both with long ears jutting out from under twin bowl cuts, sandy freckles dotting their cheeks. The third is a half-orc, a big brute of a thing, his very orc-like brow set heavy against otherwise human features. Magnus takes a step forward. “Leave that dog alone, okay? Or I’ll do something about it.” It starts with a snicker, but the three evolve into full blown laughter. Magnus watches strings of light lie deflated at their feet, definitely still there, but weaker. Thinner. Magnus steps closer. “I’m serious. I’m tougher than I look.”

“How tough could you be?” one of the elvish boys sneers. “You’re so little. And a human, to boot. Run back home to mama, okay?” He reaches out and tousles Magnus’s hair condescendingly. Magnus swipes his hand away with a sharp tap. His warning.

The elf pulls his hand back with a start and then very quickly recovers, smirks. “Hm. A bit of get-up-and-go to this little boy, huh fellas?” The other two chuckle similarly. While they speak to him, their feet are still flying repeatedly toward the battered body of the dog. Magnus clenches a fist, draws it back. “I said leave the dog alone.” He’s never heard his own voice so severe.

“I’ve got an idea,” says the half-orc, stepping away from the dog with one last violent kick. “I think I just found us a better target, boys.” He shoves Magnus back a little. “And this one’ll play along.” Before he knows what hit him, Magnus has the wind knocked out of him. He doubles over, clutching his stomach. He touches his knees to wet grass, hands to the same, kneeling as if in prayer. He wobbles. His vision blurs.

“Was that all you had?” the elvish boy asks, mock-disappointed, leaning over him. “What a bummer.” He delivers a swift kick to the same spot. Magnus feels his head go light and fuzzy with lack of air. Ceding to their goads, he lifts a fist and swings blindly until he connects with flesh. This is the first punch he has ever delivered, and he feels good about it as the second elf stumbles backwards at the strike. This moment of pride is short-lived, however, as the elf soon snorts down at him. “You think that was bad? Try again, shortstack.” Another kick, and another, this one to his back, and he’s not any sort of upright anymore. Magnus gulps in air. “Stop-” he has the sense to mutter, and is answered with laughter. A fist connects with his cheek. He closes his eyes. A foot strikes the back of his head and stars fill his vision. Magnus stops hearing. The world is replaced with a shrill ringing sound. He curls into a ball, but the blows don’t stop. He waits. It seems to only get harder, more incessant, all three boys wailing on him with hands and feet and words, and Magnus just stays still. He covers his head with two small hands and waits for the pain to stop.

And, like the suns rising, it does.

Magnus’s vision comes back slowly, like a curtain drawing upward, and he finds himself on his back. He blinks up at two suns setting, the sky a gentle lilac tinged with deep blue clouds. He times his shallow breathing to the waves of light dancing between the treetops overhead, the birds fluttering by, the clouds to each particle of water within them. And then his vision is shadowed by a dog.

This dog, squeezing one wet eye closed like it is still in pain, regards him curiously. It snuffles along his hairline like it’s searching out some treasure. And then, like a kiss, it licks him, clear across the face. Magnus groans, disgusted, and then laughs, delighted. The dog does it again, and this time the string tying Magnus to it is clearer and brighter than the chime of a bell. He goes to pet it but - but it seems it’s too late. He sits up just in time to watch it disappear into a thicket, green and soft. A sense of incredible calm washes over him.

Magnus stares after it for a long time, the string still headed its way. He could follow. Instead, he stands, brushes off his newly battered body, and goes home.

-

“I’m gonna be a fighter,” Magnus tells Huxley, the both of them sitting on his twin sized bed. He’s holding a stick that he brought in from outside, staring it down and willing it to be a weapon fit for a hero.

“Cool,” Huxley replies. “I’m gonna be a scientist.”

“Cool.” Magnus waves the stick around a bit, thinking. “Thought you wanted to be a sorcerer.”

“Can’t,” Huxley explains simply. “Turns out neither of my parents are dragons.”

“Oh.” Magnus stands up, starts slicing the stick through the air. His form is unpracticed, to say the least. “What are you gonna study?”

“I’m gonna go on the mission to the other planes that I heard my dad talking about.” Huxley’s smile is bright through the half light. Magnus smiles back. He’s heard his own father talking about that mission, about the plan to leave their plane in the next twenty years. He scrunches his eyes up until he can picture him reading the newspaper. “It’s a silly dream,” his father says, “to go outside of our plane. Nonsense, if you were to ask me.” Magnus can see him smiling. “Not that anyone has asked, of course.” And Magnus nods back as if he understands any of it.

“I’ve heard about that,” Magnus tells Huxley. “I could never.”

“Why not?” Huxley asks. He holds his arms out wide. “There’s so much out there, Magnus. How could you not wanna see it?”

Magnus shrugs. For now at least, his own backyard is fine. It’s space enough to swing a stick and pretend to be bringing down villains, and that’s enough for him.

-

His parents get married on a day in spring.

He’s been allowed to invite one friend, and so Huxley is there and crammed into a similarly ill-fitting tuxedo beside him, scratching at his neck uncomfortably. He’s looking around with discomfort in his eyes, but standing strong. Huxley turns away from the crowd and toward Magnus, his eyes searching. He seems to find whatever it is that he needs there, and reaches a hand toward Magnus’s cheek. “You need to shave,” Huxley says, his voice split down the center by a pubescent crack. He touches Magnus’s face with fingers as gentle as a teenage boy gets. “You’re gettin’ mutton chops.”

“I’m growing ‘em out,” Magnus offers distantly, batting his hand away. He’s, to put it simply, distracted. To put it less simply, he’s enchanted. Magnus is busily tangled up in a dozen dozens of strings that connect him to every member of his family. Lighter, thinner strings for distant cousins, heavy thick ones that lie like ropes across the chests of his grandparents and his parents. Then strings between them all, too, glowing faint green and blue and yellow hues, colors that mean nothing to Magnus in all truth but make his head grow light and airy with the mere _idea_ of the color, nonetheless. Strings between the trees and his family, the trees and themselves, the flowers and their petals. His eyes weave through the mess of strings and make stitchings of them, make masterpieces.

Huxley elbows him hard in the ribs. “Quit looking starry-eyed,” he says, eyeing Magnus as he rubs newly bruised skin. “C’mon, man, you’re better than this. Don’t be such a sap.”

“If it was _your_ parents getting married, you’d understand.” Magnus notes his own voice laced with snark. But truth be told, Magnus is deflecting. He’s deflecting because he doesn’t want Huxley to elbow him again, mostly. But he also does this because he hasn’t told Huxley about these strings everywhere, the connections between everything and everything. He isn’t sure what they are, or what they mean still. Magnus is busy considering this when his mother appears, standing at the end of that aisle of chairs and people start to take their seats. Magnus snaps out of it. Magnus stands at attention. And of course, Magnus is anxious. He squirms, anticipatory, his muscles threatening to burst the tight seams in his tuxedo. It’s his father’s, too tight around his biceps, around his chest. Magnus is, for lack of a better word, big. His father stands near him now as he stands always: small and greying early, thick glasses perched crookedly on his bent nose, once broken in his youth, his shoulders bent inward. He looks terrified. Magnus understands. He would be terrified, too. His mother looks, and she is, beautiful. Her deep auburn hair is tossed in ringlets, bedazzled with fragrant blossoms. If his father is small and weak, she is a goliath standing club in hand. Her broad shoulders, her strong arms. Her kind eyes. Magnus sees so much of himself in her. He loves his mother. And Huxley mutters under his breath, “Your mom is hot.”

Magnus turns and punches him in the gut, hard enough that Huxley immediately doubles over his fist. “Fuck off,” he hisses. “And shut up.”

A wedding march begins to play. His mother comes forward. And the strings start to fall.

Magnus feels his mouth fall open as it happens, as millions of strings of light detach from their respective bodies. They float through open air, fluttering as if with a breeze, and move toward one lonely string shooting off of his mother’s breast and into his father’s. And like magic, all of these strings begin to reattach. Not to the bodies they came from- back into his mother’s. The string swells, grows, stretches like a pair of knitted gloves on a hand too large. He watches tears welling in his mother’s eyes as a beacon shoots from her heart, light brighter than the suns in the sky. She reaches the end of the aisle and without waiting for a blessing holds her lover’s face in her hands and kisses him deeply. Like an explosion, all of those lovely strings spring back to their rightful places. A dancing of lights. And Magnus is a changed man.

“Gross,” Huxley mumbles with a laugh. Magnus, through the swelling burst of tears in his eyes, laughs back and nods. It is kinda gross to watch his parents kiss. He still smiles at Huxley, brightly, and decides this all must be a sign. He’ll tell Huxley about the lights after the ceremony. But for right now, the moment Huxley turns back to face the front, Magnus places his face in his hands and weeps until his flooded heart has finally gone dry.

-

On a day well into his twenty-first year, Magnus notices a string that shoots from his chest upward, spiraling neatly into the sky. It disappears well beyond the place where he can see.

“Maybe it means you’ll make that IPRE team thing,” his girlfriend at the time suggests. She’s a druid, very in touch with the earth. She’s one of a select few people in his life that he’s told about his ability and one of even fewer who have believed. He holds her with a loose arm around her waist. “Maybe, Nell,” he responds, but knows there’s no way. Magnus has nothing to offer the IPRE: he’s not a wizard, or even remotely talented at magic. He’s in no way as intelligent as the rest applying. “You know I heard they want five wizards on their team?” he told her one night, his voice too loud in the night air and his chest to her back. He knew he was phasing into a ramble, but didn’t care. “Seven people, and five of them wizards. Five wizards, a cleric and a fighter. Just imagine it. Imagine: five wizards, a cleric, and little ol’ Magnus.”

“Hush,” she’d said, which had effectively shut him down. They went to sleep.

“Magnus on the fancy-pants space mission?” Huxley laughs from his corner position in a beanbag chair. “Good luck, sis. That Starblaster ship is worth trillions of gold pieces. Klutz boy here would break it all in a second.” He nudges Magnus. "We both know that's more of a _Huxley_ thing."

"Whatever, Huxley," she huffs, "I'm in the business of supporting my boyfriend."

"But not your own brother?" Huxley asks incredulously, and Magnus laughs at that, too. Loose strings hang across the floor and connect his feet to Huxley’s, connect Huxley’s shoulder to Nell’s with a twisted, spiraling shoot. Huxley’s still laughing a bit when Magnus’s eyes find their way up to his face. “You can’t go on the IPRE mission, buddy.” He’s still got that humor in his voice, but his eyes have gone serious. “They'll miss you down here. Aren’t the people going supposed to have like, no ties to the people around them?” The implied _in case you don’t come back_ hangs thick in the air between Magnus and Nell. They don’t talk about it, and avoid eye contact.

“Yeah, you’re right, Hux,” Magnus answers, shaking away the idea. Huxley’s right. He squeezes his arm around Nell and jostles her back and forth. “I’ve got you guys. And there’s also my mom. I could never leave her like that.” Nell giggles into her hand, and Magnus doesn’t mind. He’s a self-proclaimed mama’s boy, and truly can’t imagine a life beyond her. Huxley waves a hand dismissively, rolling his dark eyes. “Well, even bar her. Face it. You’ve just got too many ties to this plane, Mags.” He crosses his arms behind his head. "Me, though? I'm golden, baby." He flashes a smile. "I've got nothing keeping me here." Magnus nods, even though he disagrees. He'll miss Huxley desperately. Magnus knows that realistically, he can't go. Neither of them are going to make it against the thousands of others applying. He still wants like he’s never wanted before.

Huxley quietly steers the conversation to one about the dragonborn teacher he has who is, ‘no joke’, two hundred years old. Magnus lets his mind wander, and follows that glowing white string into the sky and toward what he thinks a more spiritual person would call his fate.

-

Leslie Burnsides is dying.

Magnus has slept at his mother’s bedside for days now, listening to her ragged breathing. He’s hardly slept, though, to tell the truth. He’s stayed awake tracing lines along her face with his eyes, noting sun spots and crinkles and smile lines. Some sparkle which was once there, now gone dull.

She woke up sometime last night and did not remember him. His mother has lived a long and a good life, but Magnus is torn. He has not lived enough of it with her. And yet here she is, laid in a bed, staring up at him with blank eyes and a kind mouth that calls him ‘son’ without meaning it. She says it because it is what’s kind, and because it’s just what Leslie Burnsides _does_ \- rustic hospitality is like that, you know - and because she cannot remember his name. Magnus is holding her by her shoulders, gently prompting her to remember. Remember my nickname? Remember my father? Remember teaching me to walk, to fight, to love? He’s met with a blank stare and a polite but detached head shake each time. Magnus learns quickly the feeling of his heart torn in two.

This morning, though, she is awake and truly present. She calls him Maggie just as she always has, and Magnus holds her hand. Her grip is weak. Her pulse, weaker.

He wishes she were an elf. Wishes she would outlive him by several centuries, let her deal with the heartache of losing him instead of this. But her thumb rubs his, calloused and wrinkled and decidedly, definitely human. Magnus forces back tears, incapable of crying in front of someone he feels the need to protect despite the circumstances. Despite the pain.

“It’s okay to cry, Maggie,” she says, voice as soft as a coastal breeze. “It’s sad, you know, when a person dies.” Magnus feels himself flinch back at the word dies, but a soothing hand comes to smooth down his unruly hair. Hair that matched hers, before it went a soft grey and brittle. “It’s sad,” she repeats, “but it’s just another part of living.” He nods. “I know. I know.” It’s all he can say.

“Magnus, you’ve lost so much already in life,” she says. “Your father. Your grandparents. And now, me.” She reaches up and touches his face. “You’re so strong, Magnus. You’ve survived so much loss. And you’ll survive this one.”

“I know,” he says. He chokes as he continues, his hands shaking. “I don’t want to lose you.”

“But after this, you’ve got no one left to lose.” She smiles, crows feet at her eyes. She’s so fragile. He’d give anything to protect her. “This is the last time, Magnus. This is the last time you’ll outlive love.”

“I know,” he says again. “I know. But I… it hurts.” How ineloquent. His father would laugh.

“I know it hurts, Maggie,” she coos, and she’s almost laughing, too, like she hears this connection in his head. She dabs away her own tear. “I’m hurting, too. But just imagine: it’ll never hurt again.” And she holds open her arms. Like a child, Magnus crawls into them. He lays his head on her chest and listens to her faint heartbeat, thumping away like footsteps echoing down a hallway. A long, dark hallway that leads her away from him.

Magnus closes his eyes, and for her sake, he imagines it. He imagines never hurting again. And for a moment, illuminated by the strings that connect eternity to right now, everything is beautiful.

-

His mother dies on a Tuesday morning, her hand set in his and warmth fading fast. And Magnus, tangled in one less string of brilliant light, applies for the IPRE mission.

-

“You can’t go, you know,” Nell tells him, two years later when he has finally, finally been asked back for a second interview. Huxley was not asked back, and has not talked to Magnus for a week.

Magnus rolls over in this bed that feels too small to face her. The two have taken to sleeping back to back. “What?” he asks, and he can almost feel her roll her eyes. She shifts beneath their blankets almost uncomfortably.

“I mean,” she says, “what about Huxley and I.” It isn’t a question. It’s a statement that Magnus finds himself incapable of replying to, other than to say, “What _about_ you?” 

She turns on him, suddenly and rather violently. “Don’t be like that, Magnus. Just because you’re so self-centered that you haven’t considered everything you’re leaving behind.” Magnus feels his heart squeeze in on itself at the pain in her voice. He touches her gently. “Nell, come on,” he says, still so gentle, a well-meaning laugh in his voice. He rubs her shoulder soothingly. “What are you talking about? The mission is only two months.”

“And if it’s not?” she asks. She stands up and starts to pace like he knows she does when she gets upset. Streams of moonlight slatting through the window illuminate her form in shades of blue. “And if two months becomes three and four and a year and you never come back for us?”

“Nell,” he says, like it’s either a plea or an accusation. And really, it’s both

“I don’t want to lose you, Magnus. As dumb and inconsiderate as you are, I love you.” She clenches her hands up tight. Magnus can only tell this because strings of blue light are tied around them, almost violently. He’s never seen them like that before.

“You aren’t going to lose me, Nell” he says. He pauses and thinks. “I’m not dumb.”

“The thing is,” she blurts, “you are. You’re downright _stupid_ compared to the rest of that team, Magnus. Do you even know who Lucretia _is_?”

Magnus is dumbfounded. He blinks up at her shadowy figure. “No.”

“She’s published _seventy-two_ books, Magnus. Seventy-two! Half of them are best sellers! You…” She turns to him, her teeth gritted. “You’re dumb, and you’re stronger than you have any idea what to do with. You’ll get hurt out there, Magnus. Those brainy types, they... they'll abuse you, you understand? They’ll use you like a meat shield. You don’t always have to take the big hit, Magnus. You’re a person. You’re _my_ person.” She sinks to her knees beside the bed and takes his face in her hands. Her thumbs stroke through his sideburns. “And I don’t want to lose you.”

Magnus shakes her hands away. He’s not stupid. He’s _not_. 

“I think you just did.” He sits up in bed and stares out the window to his right, away from her. A deep black sky. A string from the center of his chest that pulls him outward toward the infinity of space.

“Magnus,” she says, her voice finally, finally gone soft. Magnus is tempted to lose himself to that softness. “I wasn’t thinking,” she nearly whispers. “I don’t want to hurt you, and I didn’t mean it. Really. You’re scaring me, you realize, Magnus. You’re leaving and going somewhere no one has ever been before. And you’re the only fighter. That means you can’t rely on someone else. So much that could be there to fight, and you’re going to have to be the one to fight it all.”

“And I’m going to win when I do,” he replies. He shakes his head. “You don’t understand. There’s something out there for me, Nell. These lights-” he gestures around the room, where lights dash from floorboard to floorboard, dust mite to dust mite, ceiling to floor. “These lights are telling me so. And I need to know what it is.” He looks at her, pleading eyes. He watches her face falls. He feels his own face mimic the motion. “What?”

“Magnus…” She sighs. “Magnus, I know those lights aren’t real.” Magnus shakes his head as if trying to dismiss a thought. “What are you saying?”

“I mean, gods, you’ll be twenty-three soon. This little game you play, isn’t it getting old?”

“What _game_?” Magnus answers. “What are you even talking about, Nell? This is my life we’re considering here. This is about the mark I’m going to leave on the world.”

Magnus has always wanted to be a hero. From the time he was ten and saved that dog, he felt he was destined to protect. And sure, sometimes protecting people means getting hurt but - but he can take it when sometimes other people can’t. And this is his chance to be that hero he's always wanted to be. And so he swallows down anger, swallows down the stress and frustration he feels, incapable of expressing that to someone he loves. “Don’t you understand?” He looks down to find that his arms are outstretched as if waiting for something. An embrace. A reparation. But instead of offering anything at all, Nell just shakes her head.

“I’m not an idiot, Magnus. I _always_ knew it wasn’t real. And these make-believe connections you ‘see’ between everything and everything is getting to be too much even for me.” He stares back at her, looking for some sort of explanation. Some residual softness. “Nell,” he starts again, but finds himself cut off. It’s alright. He didn’t even know what he was going to say.

“It’s just- I know you, Magnus. And this is just another excuse for you. You say you found Huxley through the lights, found me through the lights, that you saw your mother’s soul leave her body and go to some far away plane where she’ll live happily ever after. But they’re excuses, Magnus, because you don’t want to believe some things are out of your control. Well…” She shakes her head, tears at the corners of her eyes. “Well you don’t control everything!”

“I never said I did." He stands up. "And if- if they’re not real-” He starts, but sputters off into nothing at the end of his sentence. How can he see them? How can they cast shadows and light and move and ebb and flow if they’re not real?

“They are real,” he finishes unsteadily. “I’m not a liar. And I’m not dumb.” His chest feels tight, his throat full of cottony silence like radio static. Nell stares at him without a hint of kindness and heaves another sigh.

“I’m sorry, Magnus. I really am. But when I called you dumb, I was unfortunately accurate. You’re… you're just emotionally dumb.” She wraps her arms around his shoulders. “But it’s okay. You don’t have to lie to me to impress me. And someday, we’ll tell people this story and they’ll laugh. They’ll say, _Magnus on the IPRE mission? How funny!_ ” She squeezes him, her thin arms pressing deep into his muscle. “And we'll laugh with them. You’ll be happy, Magnus. Isn’t that all you can ask for?”

Magnus stares over her shoulder, arms limp at his sides instead of holding her back. He blinks. He’s never seen a light just... just sever and simply _go out_ like it did just now.  
-

Magnus is leaving for training camp tomorrow morning. He’s going on the IPRE mission. And he’s finally, truly happy.

Huxley sits beside him, back uncomfortably stiff. His dark hair is back in a tall swoop, his eyes nearly black in the moonlight. He looks, in truth, very unhappy. Still, he smiles stiffly and rubs a hand over the rough varnish of his seat. “This bench is nice, crafty man,” he says without a single stutter in his voice. It's not nice. It's rough and slapped together and Magnus can feel splinters from it pressing into him. But it was his first try, and Huxley seems determined to keep it while Magnus is away. So Magnus thanks him anyway. Huxley tosses back nearly an entire beer and is silent.

“I’m gonna miss you, Mags,” he says eventually. His eyes are trained upward. Magnus watches as the sky dances behind him, strings between stars making the sky into confetti and streamers. Magnus nods. “I’ll miss you too,” he answers. “But I’ll be back.”

“Yeah,” Huxley says, sounding entirely unconvinced. He lifts his bottle to his lips, eyeing Magnus carefully. He tips it back. “You know,” he says, half-gargling through a mouthful of beer, “I wish I was going with.”

“Yeah?” Magnus asks. He swallows some of his own drink. Huxley nods. “Oh yeah. I’ve always wondered about the other planes, remember? I told you when we were little that I just... I think about it lots, you know." He shrugs. "What exists beyond all this. What's _bigger_ than this.” He pauses, and then holds his arms out to the sky. “This is all I know. And there’s so much that I don’t.”

“I don’t know any of it either, man,” Magnus admits, and almost feels guilty for doing so. What really sets him aside from Huxley, then? What makes him special enough to be doing such an amazing thing like this?

“But that doesn’t matter. ‘Cause you’ll learn, Mags. That’s the point.” He takes another drink. “You’ve got all the time in the world.” Huxley goes silent, pondering, and then seems to realize something mid-swallow, makes a hum noise and snaps. “Those lights!” he says, excited, and amends it to, “Those strings of light that you see. I wonder about them, too.”

“You and me both, Hux.” Magnus swallows. “Your sister didn’t believe me.”

“Who cares what Nell thinks,” he says. Huxley looks over at Magnus. “I believe in you, Magnus.”

Magnus stares down at their feet, near each other. A thick rope of light ties them together. “Thanks.” He drinks down the rest of his own bottle. He thinks about what Huxley has said.

“I’ll tell you what I see out there,” Magnus says decisively. “What I learn out there. When I come back.”

“If you come back.” Huxley smiles at him sideways, winks in that charming way he does. He sounds like he always knew that coming back might not be an option. Huxley takes another massive swig, still smiling through it. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Burnsides.”

He looks back up at the sky. Magnus looks with him, and the night bleeds on into peaceful silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter is already up cuz i didnt wanna post Just my 'oops almost all OCs' chapter with nothing else .... the third will be up at an undetermined date (when i finish it) also this might be four chapters and it might be five. It Is A Mystery
> 
> anyways. i know this is not the Only visible bonds au but i love this idea and couldnt not publish it. i hope this is up to standard
> 
> leave me some kudos, bookmarks, some good vibes in the comments. hope you like my original boys because I Do
> 
> im on tumblr @dungeondyke! follow for aesthetics and taz, all in one!


	2. starblaster

Magnus meets the team. Five wizards, a cleric, and little ol’ Magnus.

His first introduction to them is an elf charging him almost immediately at his arrival. He’s still holding his bag (packed with seven shirts, two pairs of pants, a block of wood and a knife) when she comes rushing at him, her thin shoulders squared. She rams into his chest and bounces back like a rubber band, landing on her ass.

“That’s ten gold pieces, Lup!” a voice alerts her, and Magnus turns to see another shockingly similar looking elf approach. He’s wearing the stupidest hat Magnus has ever seen.

“I like your hat,” Magnus says. He says this because a golden string of light is trying the toe of his left boot to this elf. The string is already sagging toward the ground, heavy with light and glowing deeply.

“Thanks, big guy.” He flicks the brim of his hat up to reveal a strikingly beautiful face: a long nose, full lips, glowy golden eyes that are tracing Magnus’s form like a scanner. “You’re not too bad yourself.” He looks down at the elf at their feet and nudges her with a pointed boot. “Upsy-daisy, Lulu. Those ten gold pieces ain’t gonna put themselves in my hand.” He holds out a palm and beckons. The girl on the ground groans in what sounds like an extreme pain. Magnus, alarmed, sticks out a far more friendly hand to offer her help. The elf still standing snorts. “What are you doing?”

“I’m helping her up. She seems hurt.” Magnus kicks himself briefly at the thought that he was the one to hurt her, albeit unwillingly. He has one job and he’s blown it already. The male elf blinks at him, a finely shaped brow still raised. He shakes his head like he’s in disbelief. Magnus looks back and waits for an explanation. “I’m Taako,” he says, as if that offers any sort of answer. “That’s my sister, Lup.” She rolls over onto her back and flashes a smile. “This has _gotta_ be Magnus, Koko” she says, taking his still-offered hand. Magnus nods. “Yeah. That’s me.” He pulls weakly, lifting Lup with almost no effort. She shakes the hand that helped her to her feet and then dumps ten gold pieces and a copious amount of pocket lint into her brother’s hand. A string of light ties them, every finger to every finger. 

“I bet her she couldn’t knock you over,” Taako says. “I was right. She was wrong. So she owes me.” He pockets the gold, and Magnus feels his brow furrow. “Why’d you take that bet?” He asks the girl. He looks her up and down, and then spreads his arms as he looks back to himself. “It seems pretty obvious that I’m bigger than you.” The elves share a meaningful look.

“You’ve got some stuff to learn, big guy,” says Taako. He loops his arm around Lup’s waist and the two saunter off in near-perfect sync.

It is later that Magnus meets Barry, a pudgy little man who reminds him too much of his own father. Barry seems to hide behind his thick-rimmed glasses, smiles like he's being cautious and flusters at every look. Magnus likes Barry immediately, his humility and his soft demeanor. A light casts between Barry and that female elf, hanging high above their heads like a halo, but the two seem to not know each other. Magnus wonders about it briefly, but the implications make his head hurt. Meanwhile, he has his own light touching gently at Barry’s shoulder, thin and stringy. He and Barry stand next to each other while their captain, Davenport, leads them around and through drills using the ship’s controls. Davenport’s feet glow a chaotic bright at the point where they touch the deck of the ship. A string shines curled inside his mouth and around his tongue as if it is a snake, coiled and waiting to strike. Magnus has never seen that before.

“Nerd alert,” Lup whispers to Taako, nudging him. Taako nudges Magnus too, as if they’ve created some sort of chain. “She’s right,” he says, and Magnus nods. Lup smiles brilliantly. Barry turns red. Davenport gives a stern look, but otherwise ignores them.

“I’m gonna call him Cap'n Port,” Magnus whispers back. Taako’s eyes go bright with a devious gleam. “You…” He turns to Lup. “This is the funniest motherfucker I’ve ever met in my life. Lup, I _love_ this guy.” Magnus’s heart swells proudly. If Taako is the only friend he makes this entire journey, he feels he’ll be alright.

They mill around the ship. Magnus listens distractedly, but gets the gist: his bunk is over here, the twins over here, someone named Merle over here. It’s only when Davenport points to a room and says _Lucretia_ that Magnus perks up.

Lucretia. He recognizes that name.

“She won’t join us until later,” Davenport is busy explaining. “She’s going to be our chronicler on this mission. She’s incredibly talented and a close friend of mine.” He smiles, but the smile does not feel genuine. Magnus is made uncomfortable by it.

Davenport keeps smiling much longer than he needs to, his mustache shielding his teeth. He looks a bit like a walrus. 

“And this is the ship’s greenhouse, designed to keep you feeling at home. It’s equipped with all the same plants as our world, and- ah. It looks like Merle already found it.” Davenport opens the airlock to reveal a short man, white hair in soft braids that cascade down his back. He’s faced away, uncomfortably close to a small bush that is leaned against the wall.

Merle hears Davenport’s voice and startles away from the bush. He turns around, blinking two wide, golden eyes. A shock of light connects Merle and the plant briefly, and then dies away. “What?” he says, rolling his eyes. Everyone looks back at him silently. He furrows his brow. “What! I’m praying in here! Can’t you give a man his privacy?”

A light dashes between Merle’s right arm and Magnus’s. He assumes it means they should shake hands.

Magnus steps forward and extends his arm. “Hi. I’m Magnus Burnsides.” The room falls more silent, still. And then like a wave, everyone laughs at him. Magnus feels his ears go hot, his legs getting shaky. He doesn’t particularly like being laughed at, especially in response to his kindness. Merle grabs his hand despite it, and he's smiling up toward him from under a wiry white covering of hair. “Merle Highchurch,” he says. “Pleased to meet ya. I’ll be healing your ass for the next two months.” A leaf hangs dangerously from the bottom of his beard. Magnus resists the urge to pick it out.

Davenport stops laughing with a loud _woo_. He brushes an imaginary tear from his eye. “That’s uh… well, that’s nearly everybody. Seven of us, and six are here. Everyone can retire to their rooms and we’ll meet back up in the morning when Lucretia should be here. Get comfortable, crew. You’ll be here for a while.” And with that, Davenport shuffles out of the room. Slowly, like ducklings, the crew follows.

His room is modest. A bookshelf, pre-stocked with books about the planar system, about the light of creation, about bonds. All things he knows nothing about. Scientific mumbo jumbo. Magnus scans the spines, looking for one to read, and picks out the one titled _The Planar System and You_ , by someone named Aluxius Hankri. He opens it and skims the first page. The text is small and pushed together, and there are easily seven hundred words on just this one page. His eyes blur over the text, letters jumbling and mixing together. Miniscule strings of light highlight every word, every small space between letters. With a new headache, he decides he’ll have time to read them later on. There’s a dresser already in here, too, bolted into the wall. There’s a closet with more than enough space to fit his few belongings, a few red jumpsuits and jackets already hanging. There’s a chair in the corner. A lonely hook on the wall for him to place his axe on.

Magnus lies on his back in a bed that he’s already tempted to begin rebuilding the frame of and stares up at the ceiling. This ship has less lights than he typically sees, meaning that sure, the bookshelf is connected to the books, but there are no boards in which little lights can squeeze and connect to each other. A smooth, flat plane of metal sits over Magnus’s head. He watches the lack of anything above him, and the emptiness is enough to lull him off to sleep.

He wakes to perpetually buzzing fluorescent lights. He already hears noises coming from outside, small yelps and rattling pans. Sounds that assure Magnus of life, stirring. He rises from his bed, stretching lazily, and pulls on flannel pants. He shuffles into the hallway and toward the noises.

He finds source in the kitchen, Taako standing before a lit fire. He’s got one hand on the handle of a pan, one waving a warped wand toward the pan. Whatever’s in it is shifting and changing rapidly, and he keeps muttering to himself. “Damn it!” The thing in the pan becomes entirely liquid, thick and white and immediately boiling. He taps the wand downward again. It becomes a mass of feather, stirring fretfully in the heat. Taako pulls a face and taps the wand down again. It turns into an egg this time and, seemingly content with this, he shuffles the pan back and forth. His eyes, cast downward, shift left toward Magnus. The second their eyes connect, his head flies up. Taako’s lids are heavy with sleep but open wide at Magnus before him, his mouth working wordlessly.

“Woah! Hunk alert!” That’s from behind Magnus, and he turns to find Lup. She whistles between her fingers. “Magnus is a beefcake!” She notes, as if he wasn’t aware of this. Magnus feels a blush bloom on his cheeks. “Uh,” he manages to say, and the twins laugh in tandem. Magnus scratches his neck. “Thanks.” Taako flips his braid back over his shoulder and fingers the end of it daintily. “Dontcha worry about it, big guy. Lup won’t bite.” He eyes Magnus carefully. “You are, ah.” He takes a scoop of egg out of the pan and chews it with an open mouth, turning his eye back down to look at the food. “Hm. How do I put this delicately?” He taps his chin with the spatula. “My dude, you’re _shockingly_ hairless.” Magnus feels his ears go hot, and he nods dumbly. He turns on his heel and goes back to his room, puts on a shirt and returns.

“The gun show ends now,” he jokes. He gets a genuine laugh out of Lup, and a sort of squawk that indicates joy out of Barry, now seated at the table. He greets Magnus with a sleepy good morning and Taako piles eggs onto his plate as he does. “With cheese, as per your request, Barold,” he says. “As much of an insult to my culinary prowess as that is.”

“I’ll take cheesy eggs, too, actually,” Magnus says, and Taako meets his gaze with ice in his stare. Magnus is momentarily intimidated but it passes as Taako’s demeanor softens. “All of you are animals,” he huffs, turning back to the pan. He cracks another egg and mutters something under his breath. The eggs stick to the side of the pan with the amount of cheese he’s just magicked into existence atop them.

“Morning, crew!” Magnus turns around and downward to find the source of the voice. Captain Davenport has stepped into the small kitchen, as well, turning the group into a crowd. His little feet are enclosed in bunny slippers and a steaming mug sits in his hands. He smiles. “Good to see you all getting along already. That’s what this first week is gonna be all about!” He raises his mug as if in a cheer and then lowers it to his lips with a long _slurp_. He takes a look around. “We’ll all meet on the upper deck around two to meet Lucretia and begin our training.” Magnus affirms this immediately, nodding enthusiastically. Lup and Barry follow with less charged nods of the head, and Taako waves a hand distractedly. “Got it, bubeleh, lemme make these gross eggs.” He turns just long enough to shove a plate into Magnus’s hands and then dumps the contents of the pan. Magnus blinks down at his plate. Not offered a fork, he opts for using one hand to lift the eggs to his mouth and chew heartily. 

Taako gapes at him. “Animals, I tell you. Anyone other than Lulu want me to make them real food?” Davenport slurps noisily at his coffee. “We don’t have much in the way of gourmets on the ship, Taako,” he warns, and before he can even finish his sentence, Taako snorts and waves it away. “I’m skilled as _fuck_ , Cap’n Port. I can make everything into a five-star meal.” Magnus watches Taako and Davenport discuss this as he chews his food. And it’s… it's _delicious_. Magnus has never tasted anything like it. He feels his brow furrow as he continues to chew. It’s like nothing he’s ever experienced. The moment feels almost transformative, and as if the universe heard this thought, the string between him and Taako suddenly pulls taut, swells with a burst of light that swears the bond between them just got stronger. Magnus pauses, unsure. He can’t figure it out. He wants to ask how he did that, if Taako knows that he just tied himself to Magnus forever, if he maybe understands any of this. Magnus wants to question it all, to get the answers he’s been hunting for all his life. And all of this is based on this plate of fucking eggs.

“What’s _in_ this?” is what he manages to say, only once his plate is empty but for a crumble or two of scrambled eggs. The kitchen turns to look at him, and it occurs to Magnus that he may have interrupted a conversation. Taako assesses the look on his face and grins wolfishly. “I recognize that look, Mango. You just got hooked on food done Taako style.” He pats Magnus on the shoulder with his empty hand. “There’s no goin’ back. Nothing will ever taste as good again.”

Magnus believes that, but it’s not what he meant. Something about that food was… special.

Several hours later, Magnus is on the top deck, waiting. Barry is there already, too; he and Magnus have been discussing their opinions on the rest of the crew so far. Barry has strong opinions but is timid about them, and he gets only more timid when Magnus brings up Lup. Barry turns pink and stutters, “She seems okay!”, and then almost immediately forces the conversation on toward speculation. 

“I’ve heard of Lucretia before,” Barry says, still stumbling and recovering from his fluster. “She’s ghost written some of my favorite books.” Magnus scratches his back carefully with the point of his axe. “Uh, yeah. I’ve heard of her, too.” He has, but he doesn’t bother to tell Barry that reading is hard for him because of lights and lights and lights, the way that word strings to word to word to sentence to paragraph. The way that the pages glow much like torchlight, less like a piece of paper. Barry wouldn’t understand.

“She’s incredibly intelligent, definitely. But I hear she’s a little bit of a shut in.” Magnus, assessing Barry’s general personality and demeanor, wonders if Barry has any room to comment on that. But he smiles and shrugs off the gossip. “I hope she’s nice,” Magnus responds. “As long as she’s nice, I don’t care what else she is.” Barry’s eyebrows knit together. He takes a step closer to Magnus. “You’re, ah. Pretty trusting, aren’t ya, Magnus?”

“Huh?” Magnus tilts his head. Of course he is. Magnus has always seen the good in everyone. He knows that everyone, no matter who they are, loves. Even the really bad people have lights stringing them to other things in the world. He wants to protect the light in people. That’s always been his creed. Not hearing these connections in his mind, Barry puts a firm hand on Magnus’s shoulder. “Listen. Are you afraid?” Magnus shakes his head. He is, if he were to be honest. This mission terrifies him. Barry’s sheer intelligence terrifies him, even. But he’s the fighter here, he’s strong and he knows it, so if anyone asks, the answer is-

“No! What?” He keeps shaking his head. Barry shakes his right back. “You don’t know _how_ to be afraid,” he says, warning. “And, honestly kid? You’re never gonna survive if you keep that up.” Still holding onto his shoulders, Barry walks behind Magnus and points. “See them?” Magnus follows the line of his arm out to where the rest of the crew is starting to board the deck. Taako and Lup lead the pack, arms slung around each other’s waists, talking and laughing inaudibly. Barry points again. “They don’t trust anybody but each other. Davenport? He just trusts his ship. Merle? Hell, he probably doesn’t trust anybody.” He jerks Magnus around to face him. “This is just what I’m pickin’ up. But I’m usually right, and that leaves you and me, Magnus. If you go out on this thing trusting everybody, you’re gonna get hit hard. But you can trust _me._ ” He pats Magnus almost condescendingly. “I keep an eye out for you, you keep an eye out for me. Sound good?”

“Sounds… good,” Magnus echoes, dumbstruck. His response is rewarded with another pat and then Barry is shuffling toward the rest of the group, hollering out a greeting. Magnus hangs back for a moment. Barry is wrong. Lup trusts more than Taako- she’s connected to Merle and to Barry and back to him. Taako is tethered hard to his sister, definitely, but he glows with everyone else’s light, too. Magnus knows these things. And so how could he not trust these people? His intuition has never been wrong. And sure, they’re all a little weird, but there’s so many strings of light that tie them back to Magnus. Those lights have never been wrong. Never. 

Who is he to not trust them?

Magnus shakes off the gloomy feeling. Barry can distrust all he wants. Magnus believes all people can be good people. And so Magnus faces the oncoming crowd, takes a deep breath, and rushes in.

Everyone else opted to come up as a group, it seems. Davenport is just steps behind the twins, and Merle is close behind him, cleaning dirt off his sleeves feverishly. And behind all of them walks a woman, two journals held close to her chest. Her eyes dart nervously, her tongue tucked in a focus between her lips. And Magnus can only stare.

“Magnus! Barry! This is Lucretia, if you couldn’t guess. She’s still a little shy, but we’ll welcome her with open arms, yeah?”

Magnus nods, but doesn't hear Davenport whatsoever. A thick string of light ties Lucretia’s forehead to Magnus’s. And it isn’t just him: a string wraps from Lucretia around Lup’s body, Barry’s feet, Merle’s hands and Davenport’s tongue. A thick rope, almost licorice-like, shoots in one side of Taako’s chest and knots on the other, setting it in place. But that’s not what’s strange.

“It’s so nice to meet you!” Barry is gushing. “I’ve heard so much about you- what was it like working with Rhezam Pano? His opinions on modern arcane usage are so controversial, I just wondered if meeting him was uncomfortable- or if you agree?-”

Magnus keeps staring at Lucretia, his tongue tied. He’s never seen anybody with a _red_ bond before.

-

Several months later, Magnus flees a crumbling world aboard a silver ship. He looks down at the world below, at his long tether back down to the ground and back to Huxley, and watches as darkness streaked with ribbons of color severs that tie. He watches as it swallows whole every bond in the world, those between Magnus and the sky, between clouds shaped like ice cream cones and birds that pass overhead. Between flowers and their petals. Between ceiling and floor. Between everything and everything.

He’s outlived love yet again.

His crewmates stand behind him, silently watching as he beats at the window fruitlessly, sobbing without discretion, without care. Strings of almost invisible light lead them back to him. He gulps, gasps for air, chokes on his tears as he swallows down anger, regret. Fear. Here they are: the only bonds left in the planar system.

-

Magnus allows his gift to guide him.

It leads him, first, to the power bear. In the weeks that Davenport hovers over the planet, Magnus follows with his eyes the light that guides his biceps toward the surface. He thinks at first that this means there are humans. When he discovers there aren’t, he is confused but not deterred. He follows that light and spends his year training. Becoming stronger. When he makes it back home, he’ll have so much to show for it.

It is in that first year that Magnus dies. 

The sky is falling down. It’s that same darkness that took his home, that took his best friend. And Magnus will be damned before he watches it do this again.

There’s babies all over the place, hiding in shallow holes that they’ll make their graves. Magnus doesn’t speak the language and he damns himself for it. All this time, all this training and he still knows so little. And now, he’s lost. He should’ve made Taako or Lup or Barry stay with him, but the idea of letting them die too sickens him. Instead, he wordlessly scoops up any creature he can carry and runs, any direction away from the pillars of inky darkness. He’s acutely aware that he cannot see the Starblaster anymore. He’s being scratched, bitten, beat. He’s bleeding, and he doesn’t care. It’s fine, it’s fine. He’s just going to die. He’s going to fucking die anyway.

Magnus is carrying a swan away when it happens. He’s made it into a clearing, somewhere the darkness hasn’t permeated yet, and he’s setting down every animal he can right here. There’s a congregation of confused grunts; the animals recognize him but cannot understand him. He’s just set the swan down and turns to flee back into the forest but finds his exit blocked by thick blackness. He turns to run another way: similarly blocked. He turns in a circle and finds no redemption. The Hunger has crept a circle around him, as if mocking him. Magnus hears the whirring of the bond engine and looks upward. The Starblaster is leaving without him. He watches it float out of existence, ping into the sky. Lights follow after it, thus far uncut by the Hunger. He wonders if that light will go on once he dies.

Magnus falls to his knees. And he yells up toward the sky. Not a scream, and not out of fear, but out of frustration. He promised Huxley he’d come back. He was always supposed to come back.

_You don’t always have to take the big hit, Magnus._

He feels a wetness at his elbow. He turns and there’s a rabbit, tiny nose pressed to his skin. It blinks its button-like eyes and is still. On his other side, a feather. The swan has approached him. It lifts one downy wing to shield him.

All around him, these little creatures gather. Bear cubs and chickens and foxes and lizards, all of them saved. Saved, but dying despite it.

Magnus’s throat fills with tears. He’s not religious, but… dear gods. Dear gods.

He spreads his arms and looks up to the sky. In his next life, he’ll do better.

The Hunger consumes him. The feeling is warm, almost inviting. A voice in his head whispers that he should cede to it, become part of it. But Magnus’s will is stronger than that. He steels himself and utters back to the Hunger, with the last of his breath, that he’d rather choke. And like it was a wish, he does.

Living inside the Hunger is dark. Magnus sits and waits for something to happen.

Inside this pit of nothingness, Magnus sees - no, _feels_ \- one string of glorious light. It ties him to the heart of it. But before he can move toward it like he knows to do, he opens his previously closed eyes. He sees himself, a figure, hovering in the middle of the darkness. He has no form, is only lights, all a light shimmering yellow with one red light tied to what appears to be his center. He blinks at it once, stunned, and twice, stupefied. His third blink opens his eyes to fluorescent lights.

And then he notices his crew is around him, all similarly dazed. Barry is the one that notices him, and he hurries over, arms open. He tosses them around Magnus’s shoulders, and then more arms are there. Lucretia is hugging him too, and then Lup and Taako and even Merle. Davenport is steering the ship, but he still tosses a gaze back his way. Magnus decides that’s all he can really ask of him.

“You have a black eye,” Barry laughs when he pulls away finally, and Magnus laughs back, shocked into it. He can feel it, that throbbing pain so familiar. Pain. Such a decidedly _alive_ thing to be feeling.

“And Merle, you have a cut on your forehead.” Barry is bustling over to Merle now, holding his face in his hands despite the dwarf’s protests. “This is fascinating!” he chirps, rubbing a thumb up and down roughly over Merle’s very real cut while Merle struggles. “Lup, c’mere, look at this, they’re just like they were-”

“Magnus? Are you okay?” Lucretia is still holding on to Magnus almost desperately. He pats her back gently, forces a smile. “I’m alright,” he manages shakily. “I’m okay. I’m alive.” He doesn’t tell them what dying felt like, although he can practically see the question on their lips. He’s not sure what he did could even be considered dying. Lucretia rubs his arm and smiles, then the group hug finally subsides and Magnus is left alone. He scrubs at his uninjured eye with his palm. He’s fine. At least, he will be soon. But for a moment there in the darkness of the Hunger, Magnus saw himself, a million million lights strung together in the indefinite shape of everything.

-

Magnus does not lose hope. They watch that darkness, the Hunger, consume planet after planet. But those colors in the Hunger - there’s _light_ in them. Light, and Magnus is tied to it with one long string that he only sees when the Hunger is feasting. That’s proof, he thinks. His home is still alive in there. And he’ll go back someday.

Things change, consistently. But every year, the Hunger feasts. And they all go back to who they were.

It upsets Magnus for several reasons. He doesn’t seem to age, mostly- Magnus always thought he would look handsome with a grey streak in his hair, and he loses all of the cool scars which he accumulates over the cycles. But more, it becomes routine. This fantastical space mission goes mundane, a dragging lapse of searching out the light, retrieving it, fighting the hunger, running away despite it all. The novelty of it has long since burned out. And Magnus is burning, too, tired and yet restless.

On cycle forty-one, things change.

Davenport passes through the wobbly sky and everyone moves back into their places. They do the routine checks as Davenport pulls toward the glowing lilac speck in the distance- the next planet they must save. Everyone is here, no one has aged, their food supply has replenished. A mouse scuttles around the perimeter of the ship, trying uselessly to find his way home. 

Merle is back, just like every cycle. He hangs contemplatively near the window, staring outward. Taako has approached him from the left, and so Magnus only thinks it logical to come in from the right.

“It was weird,” Merle is saying, sounding much more genuine than the dwarf usually gets. He’s shaking his head, dirt-lined fingernails scraping over the cut at his forehead. “Just… weird. How he wanted to know about the ship, and how we travel. And he wanted to know about us, too.” He turns to Taako and smiles, and then directs that smile to Magnus, too. “I think we’re friends,” he reports, and both of them return blank stares. Merle rolls his eyes. “Me and John, I mean.” 

“Uh, he’s the freakin’ Hunger, Merle. Not _John_.” Merle nods, but waves a hand dismissively. “Oh yeah, I agree. John isn’t a very suiting name for the eater of worlds. How about Xavier, or Vernon?” Merle chuckles to himself while Taako’s eye visibly twitches. He pulls his hat off and shakes his head violently. “Nuh-uh. It’s not funny, Merle. You go to Parlay for a reason, ya know? You’re supposed to be figuring out if he- if _it_ has a weakness. Not going all buddy ol’ pal with an eldritch horror.” Taako looks to Magnus, wringing his hat between his hands. “Can you tell him, Mags?” he pushes. “Cuz he’s not gonna listen to me. Tell him he’s being a fucking idiot?”

Magnus takes a pause. He remembers arguing with Merle about this before, the two of them seated on the floor of Magnus’s room. “Maybe _stop_ giving him so much tactical information about, you know, our ship,” he’d said. He shook his head. “And how we escape him every time? Just a suggestion. Because sure, we’re learning a lot about him esoterically, but not like weaknesses, strengths, fighting.” He shrugged at Merle. “Y’know. Important things.”

“Okay,” Merle had grouched back. “Okay, sure. I’ll just say, how do I kill you, John? I’ll just ask that next time, smart guy.” He shook his head. “You don’t understand, Magnus.”

“You’re right, I don’t! You realize, right, that that’s what he’s asking you!” 

“No, he’s not!” Merle stood up. “He’s not. He’s asking me how I come back to life.”

Magnus’s throat was tight and cottony, his face red. How could Merle be so naive? How could he risk their lives like this? 

Magnus knew even then, even thirteen cycles ago when that conversation happened, that the Hunger was too strong for them to ever fight. To let the Hunger have more information would be a critical mistake.

“What was his first question?” Magnus had asked. Merle blinked back, confused. “How do I come back to life,” he reported. And Magnus stood up, too.

“Don’t you see?” he exploded, finally too fed up with his fear and discontent. He was shaking his head, hands in his hair, and Merle had this look on his face that said he looked absolutely hysterical, but Magnus couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. “His first question was how do you come back to life? That’s _how do I kill you for good,_ Merle! All of us!”

“I don’t know!” Merle had answered, loud enough that the sound echoed back off the hollow walls of the Starblaster. Magnus silenced. Merle stood breathing heavily, chest heaving. “I don’t know how to kill me for good. And he doesn’t know that, either. So… so mind your business, _Magnus_ , and I’ll mind mine.” And then Merle had left. He died hours later in Parlay, and Magnus was left with a bad taste in his mouth the entirety of that cycle.

Magnus is still silent now. He’s thought a lot about Merle and John, about Merle’s protectiveness of him, about things John knows or maybe doesn’t know and about the crew’s silent agreement that Merle would just never be around anymore. The fact that Merle dies the first day, every time, shirt off, heart on his sleeve. And Magnus hates it. But he’s thought about it a lot, and Taako is rather impatiently waiting for a response.

“I think it’s… Nice, I guess,” he says awkwardly, eyeing Merle. Merle’s eyebrows shoot up, and he tilts his head. Taako’s face falls, but Magnus continues. “Nice that even, you know. The Hunger can make… Friends.” He shrugs and gestures to the lights that speckle the floor as if Taako can see them, can see these lights that connect he and these people who have become his family. “Bonds.” 

“You’re all so fucking trusting,” Taako spits out after a moment of shocked silence. He’s shaking his head, backing up. “There’s this _thing_ that kills half of us routinely and you all just dance around that fact - _oh I’m glad it can make friends!_ Who gives a fuck about friends! If you all start being like this, we’re gonna- we’ll- I- Fuck!” Taako turns tail and rushes off toward the dormitory hallway.

Magnus feels his face go hot, every eye on him and Merle, alone by the window. Merle is still staring up at him, some sort of respect gleaming in his eyes. Magnus pushes his hair back fretfully. “I, uh.” He faces the ground, counting specks in the linoleum. Tiny lights dot the floor between tiles. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Lup says, but her voice is gentle as if to not disturb the quiet. “Taako just… he doesn’t like the dying, is all. But really, who would be surprised that Magnus is pro-friendmaking?

“Or that Merle would do something stupid,” Magnus jokes back hollowly, but no one laughs. He waits for a moment to pass before he mumbles, “I was, you know. Joking.” Because he doesn’t think Merle was wrong.

Something in the Hunger has lights about it. Something in the Hunger has the power to turn humans into those lights, those ties of fate and love and totality, and Magnus has a growing suspicion as to what the colored streaks in the Hunger really are.

The Hunger is something special. Something resplendent. Whatever it - or whatever _he_ is, it can’t be entirely bad. Nothing can be.

“I told him about you all this time,” Merle cuts in softly, loud enough that the rest of the crew hears, soft enough that Magnus knows the words are meant for him. “About your carpentry, and your friends back home. And about Lucretia’s writing, and Taako’s cooking.” He drops his head, fingers still fumbling with his scab. “About Davenport. And Barry, and Lup.” He shrugs it off. “I thought it was nice, you know. Just…” He trails off. The scab pulls away from his skin and beneath is flesh, pink and raw. He’s bleeding.

“I dunno,” Merle mutters. “I guess just the promise that someone other than us knows our story, just incase...” He silences again. And that silence spreads across the ship.

The mouse’s claws scrape metal down to slivers, shrieking, trying desperately to escape. And rather quietly, from where she’s sketching something down furiously, Lucretia sets aside her pen and says, “Thank you, Merle.” 

It is not often that they consider their mortality, since they, in truth, don’t have it. But even Merle, desensitized by years of being consumed by dark flames, body shriveled in a constructed building, can see it. 

This forever cannot last forever. And the very idea is violent and horrific to them all.

“Guys,” comes Davenport suddenly, his voice a fist shattering the moment. “You’re, uh. You’re gonna wanna see this.”

Magnus rushes over, ducking behind Davenport to ruffle his hair. Davenport gives no response, and Magnus knows immediately that something has changed. Forty-one years of repetition come screeching to a halt as Davenport refuses to duck and curse some strange gnomish curse at Magnus for mussing up his hair.

Forever has ended, just as fragile as the silence into which it was spoken. And Magnus looks out the windshield of the Starblaster

The purple-hued world hanging in the sky looks more than familiar. Deep blue clouds hang over the land in places, shadowing emerald colored grass. Lights dance across it in strings like the gods have decided to throw a party: green, yellow, blue streamers floating through open air. The silence is shattered as Lucretia chokes out a sob. She’s placed her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking, and she keeps repeating, “Gods, gods. Gods bless us.”

They’re pulling into the atmosphere now. Modern buildings dot the surface. People, ant-sized, roam the surface. Lup has stepped up beside Magnus on one side to see the windshield, Merle on the other. Lup has her hands on her hips.

“I don’t get it,” Magnus says. “It looks like any other place we’ve been. It’s so familiar.”

He’s disappointed, to be honest. The existence of people wasn’t exclusive to one planet. So what if this sky is a soft purple? Sure it’s pretty, but he’s _seen_ every shade of purple before now. So what if it’s inhabited? They’ve done it all before. Nothing, nothing new.

“That’s the point, Magnus,” Lup laughs, nudging his shoulder, and Magnus knows this must be serious because she didn’t call him Mango. She redirects her strength into outright shaking, knocking him on the head with one limp fist. “C’mon, use your big ol’ human brain. Don’t you remember?”

“I’m pulling in for an emergency landing,” Davenport says. “Someone check on Lucretia, make sure she’s okay.” He wipes his brow with his palm. “This is it, folks.”

The words echo in Magnus’s head as he looks around at the platform they’re landing on. Red banners with golden and black lettering, patterns of rainbow circles, squadrons of red robed figures roaming about. Light and color and one beaming light that pulls upward from his chest.

Lucretia’s prayers grow in volume. Magnus feels joy, and then incomprehensible sorrow, and then a sort of hollowness in his belly. A pit that goes all the way down. He thinks he’s going to be sick.

Magnus squeezes his eyes shut and buries his face deep in the cushioned top of Davenport’s captain seat. Even through the thick foam, he hears the next words spoken.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Merle mutters. “We made it home.”

They hop off the Starblaster, all but trampling each other. A small crowd has already formed outside, faces familiar but now aged. The communications officer they lost touch with, now in his fifties. Their photographer, hardly an adult when they left, now towering above them and fully grown. Lucretia goes first, dumping journals onto asphalt, still crying. “Read them,” she’s saying. “Please, please, we’re the Starblaster crew.” Faces are lighting with understanding as the twins, followed by Barry and Davenport exit the ship. People are starting to yell. “It’s them!” they say.

“They’re back!”

“We thought for sure you all were goners!”

And finally, only Magnus is left standing on the ship. Because something is incredibly wrong.

The elves they worked with have aged too harshly. They were only in their second or third centuries, they shouldn’t be greying yet. The humans aged right, but everyone else seems... generic, almost. He recognizes faces, but the faces are merely that.

And then, outside the ship, he catches a glimpse of a familiar man, a glimpse of the dark hair swooping tall above his head, of eyes like obsidian, of previously unknown creases at the corners of his eyes and mouth. And then all of that doubt is secondary, all of the wrong things seem small and Magnus is crying, and he’s off the ship and taking him into his arms.

“Huxley,” he babbles, near incoherency. “Huxley, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry…”

Huxley smiles into his shoulder and Magnus can picture it, all crooked and too wide. “It’s alright, Magnus, it’s alright,” he says. “I hope you learned a lot out there.” And who cares that Huxley doesn’t ever call him Magnus. Who cares that something big, something crucial, has changed. Who cares that the bond that should light the way between Magnus and Huxley is missing. Right now, Magnus is home. And home is still here.

They’re swept away by the press, and _how did you survive_ turns out to be the primary question. Magnus finds it humorous, coming from the group of people he watched swallowed whole by impenetrable darkness, but Lucretia tells him not to say that. Magnus figures from the look in her eyes that she too is skeptical of their world’s survival, and by extension, all the people on their world. They watched them die, after all.

So instead, they let Barry and Davenport explain the logistics of the ship to the public for the first time in forty-one years, let the public marvel at their bond engine- one of a kind, as it turns out to be- and gawk at their outdated clothing choices. They pose for magazines, for billboards, television specials are made. They’re all the world is talking about: seven birds, come home to nest.

They stay together those first few weeks, weeks that dissolve into a month, and then two. But the media coverage dies down and then, predictably, so does their patience.

Barry is the first to go. He says he’s visiting his mother’s grave one night and he doesn’t reappear the next morning. Lucretia goes after him, offering no explanation. Their stories are published without a word. The public raves. The twins go soon after, Taako to chase fame, Lup to chase Barry. She says she misses him. Magnus wonders if she’ll miss the rest of them.

Merle leaves fifth, just to follow the crowd. He says he misses the beach.

This leaves Magnus and Davenport alone for the first time since the journey began, both standing on the abandoned deck of the Starblaster, staring up and into the eternity of the deep darkness that is their home planet’s sky.

“I miss them,” Davenport says one night over a checkers board. Magnus prefers the game to chess, and so he isn’t complaining. He jumps, and takes two of Davenport’s pieces with him.

“They were always going to leave,” Magnus answers. Davenport jumps. He takes one of Magnus’s pieces.

“I know.” He nudges his piece forward. “King me.” Magnus does.

“Sometimes, I’m just so angry about it.” Davenport shakes his head. “I’m angry at them, of course, for leaving. And then I’m angry at myself for staying. And then I just feel like I could just cry, or scream, or explode with how much I’m holding in.” He pauses for a long while. “I just miss them so much.”

Magnus shrugs uncomfortably. “The sun is nice. I missed the sun.”

“There were suns on other planets,” Davenport replies. He shakes his head down at the board. “And on other planets, at least we were all together.” Magnus snorts a little. “What, was forty years not enough for you, Cap'n Port?” he jokes. Davenport laughs shortly, but the sound is bitten off and souring with grief. He shakes his head again. “I guess not.” Davenport turns away from the board now, glances out toward the observation deck. He points with a shaky finger. “Remember when Lucretia used to go out there, and sketch constellations?”

“Yeah.” 

“I miss that, too.”

Magnus is silent. He senses Davenport has more to say.

“I don’t- I didn’t _have_ a lot before this mission, Magnus, that’s what you’ve gotta understand. I’m only half gnome, you know, on my dad’s side, and so when he ran out I was left with humans. They’re all long gone.” He shrugs, jumps, takes another of Magnus’s pieces. “I don’t have anything to come back for. There’s just nothing here for me. And when the Hunger swallowed up this world… I hate to say it, but I was happy.” Magnus slides his piece across the board between two spaces. He’s cornered.

“Things were good when the mission started. I mean, the mission gave me purpose, a family, a place to call home.” Magnus notices a way out and takes two more of Davenport’s pieces. “King me,” Magnus answers. Davenport does.

“This mission was my life, Magnus. And now that it’s over, I… I don’t know what to do.” He shakes his head, glances down at the board. “I’m down to one piece,” he says, and doesn’t sound surprised.

“I’m winning,” Magnus says. He pauses, uncomfortable. “I’m leaving, Captain. I’m going to go visit some folks.”

“I know,” Davenport says. “I know.” He laughs again, and this time the sound is sticky, almost like he’s near tears. He shakes his head. “And I’ll miss you too, Magnus, just like I miss everyone else.” With that, Davenport moves his piece forward, and Magnus immediately sees a way that he can win. Davenport has put his last piece in danger almost intentionally.

He avoids it. He jumps into its path.

They play until the round ends with Davenport winning. Davenport goes to bed and Magnus unpacks his closet for the first time in nearly half a century, closing it all back into the small bag he brought with him when he was so young and naive. He looks down at his hands, at the memories they’re holding. And without so much as a goodbye, Magnus leaves Davenport alone.

Magnus goes to stay with Huxley. When he asks, Huxley claims to have lost contact with Nell, eyes shifting nervously, but even so Magnus is wholly convinced. Last Huxley heard, she was living on the coast. Magnus wonders if she’s run into Merle. He wonders if she’d like the people who became his everything.

Huxley works for the IPRE now, too. He explains were in the process of reconstructing a bond engine when the Starblaster crew came back, and now they don’t need to. They have the workings of the light of creation aiding them already. Huxley also explains to Magnus what exactly the lights he sees are. “It’s sort of complex,” he says, digging a blanket out of the closet for Magnus to throw on his couch. “I know you didn’t study with the institute for long, but I’ll try to explain it simply.”

“I’m not dumb, Hux,” Magnus scoffs. “I can understand your scientific mumbo jumbo.”

Huxley proceeds to rant for fifty minutes, in a voice Magnus does not recognize, on the discrepancies between bonds and actual _lights_ , the light of creation included, and about how bonds link up the planar system that Magnus never explored. How bonds connect flowers and their petals, ceiling and floor, everything and everything. Magnus stops listening at some point, fading in and out of memories of his forty year journey. He wants to tell Huxley about them all, but when he tries, Huxley answers in that same hollow voice that he’ll just read the book.

That book can’t capture those moments like Magnus did. They can’t feel the warmth of his friend’s blood seeping into his clothes, the itch of skin as he came back to life each year, the echoing hollowness of death. The fullness of the Hunger.

Magnus does not argue. He cedes and sleeps on Huxley’s couch for three months before it all happens again.

Huxley has invited Magnus to the IPRE lab, something he was never previously granted access to. They’re working with Barry right now, trying to reconstruct the light of creation. It seems impossible to Magnus, who has seen it torn apart forty times but never once put together. Still, Huxley assures him that it is a possibility. Huxley’s eyes are dull. They seem fake, glassy.

The day outside is grey, the sky flushing with darkness and still winds. The grasses seem less green. This is all so oddly familiar to Magnus, but so is everything now that they’ve come home. He ignores it.

The lab is busy, large windows displaying a dark world outside. Someone says they’ve detected a large mass overhead, but no one acknowledges his find. Magnus feels his eye twitch.

Barry is swarmed by lab technicians, all with their empty echo eyes, but the moment he sees Magnus he wades out of the group and pulls him into an embrace. “I missed you, buddy,” he says softly. “I miss you all.” Magnus pulls away, a bit resistant to that. “Why’d you leave like that, then?” he questions. Barry’s smile falters. “We couldn’t just stay there forever, Magnus. We spent forty years on that ship, and you and me are humans. We’ve only got so long.”

“You didn’t even say goodbye,” Magnus argues. “You didn’t even say why.”

“Well, I’m saying why now. I’m sorry, Magnus, but I… I couldn’t anymore.” He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Between how I feel about Lup and the fact that I’m going to be aging again, I couldn’t handle it. I had to go.”

“You didn’t,” Magnus argues. “You could’ve at least told us. Lup came looking for you, you know.” Barry’s face contorts strangely, and he opens his mouth like he’s going to say something but changes his mind. It takes him a long moment to recover his words. “I don’t want to have this argument with you, Magnus.” Barry turns his back, then shakes his head and turns back to face Magnus. “Really, I’m sorry. And I’ll visit everyone with you if that’s what you want.” 

“We don’t know where everyone is,” Magnus says in return. “Everyone left.” He’s sad and confused. He wanted things to change, but what he really wanted was all the people to change with him. Everyone moving at their own pace has turned his routine into a race that he is losing in. Barry’s eyebrows lower, and he shrugs a little. “Oh.” He swallows hard. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Magnus says, suddenly very aware of Huxley over his shoulder and embarrassed to be being so childish in front of him. It hits him now for the first time that he is still a child. Huxley is so much more than him.

Barry shakes his head again. “No, I do have to be sorry. I really do. So you wanna know the honest truth, Magnus?” Magnus nods, just praying the conversation ends. Barry smiles wistfully. 

“I just wish things had stayed the same.”

A pillar of darkness crashes through the roof and crushes Barry, inches from Magnus’s feet. The bond between them splits, shatters, disappears. Screams echo out as more come through the ceiling, pulverizing glass and wood and bonds just as quickly as they fall. Magnus takes two slow steps back, bumps into Huxley who is frozen in place. His instincts kick in. He’s survived this before.

“C’mon, _run_!” He shoves Huxley, hard, and it seems that months of training for the mission paid off. Huxley, once bigger and stronger than Magnus, crumples like a folding chair, and his legs start moving. They avoid several more pillars as they leave the building. Outside, the sky is a pitch black ribboned with green and blue and yellow, one red stream tying them all together in a neat braid. The golden rope that ties the Hunger to Magnus is thin and wiry, fading in and out in the remnants of light. If he looks long enough, he can see it disappearing.

“Magnus, what is this?” Huxley asks him, out of breath and clearly exhausted. His voice is shaky and hesitant, almost as if it is ceasing to exist. Magnus shakes his head.

“It’s the end of the world,” he says. “Again.” 

He gets the words out before Huxley goes down, his foot trapped in inky blackness. Magnus stops beside him. Huxley, still short of breath, tells him to leave. Magnus refuses. “This time,” he promises, “I’ll go with you.”

The darkness spreads across their bodies, envelops them. Magnus has felt it all before, and with his last breath, tells Huxley to resist its call. They hold hands as the darkness begins to claim its victory for the last time.

Huxley’s mouth works open and closed for a moment like he’s going to argue, but he can’t find words. Eventually, he gives up, and in a voice that does not belong to Huxley he says, “I suppose you were going to find out eventually.”

Magnus startles, but their intertwined hands are already encased in darkness. Magnus is unable to move away from this stranger. “Who _are_ you?” Magnus asks, and the stranger who looks like Huxley smiles. “I believe you call me the Hunger. But John is alright too.”

Magnus is stunned into silence. The darkness has crept a ring about his neck.

“Won’t you join me this time, Magnus?”

Magnus grits his teeth. “Fuckin’ eat me, John.”

His eyebrow raises. In that terrible, smooth voice, the Hunger answers, “If you insist.”

The darkness is world-shattering as Magnus is swallowed by it. It is so deep it hurts to look at, the very opposite of light, somehow just as bright with the bonds shining through it. Magnus recognizes all of this landscape, he knows it all too well. The warmth, the loneliness, this crowded, empty space. All these souls, these lights, but not a single ounce of humanity. Water, water, everywhere.

Magnus weeps. Or, he tries, but his physical form has become lights again, glowing and swirling in indefinite patterns. Even so, he feels his heart grow lighter by the minute, lighter as he cries away the pain. He was supposed to stay this time. And they were supposed to stay with him.

From deep, deep within himself, Magnus asks a question, and he directs it to John, not the Hunger.

_Why?_

And time goes hurtling on, infinite, and then screeching to a halt in the same instant.

“Magnus, I’m going to be frank with you,” says that horrible voice. “I am, arguably, a man. And being a man, I have passions, goals, dreams. But all of this has gone so far beyond that.” The world around Magnus pulsates. “When I feast, I just… it makes me feel so _close_ to people. To them, and all the people they loved by extension. I was never very close to people before, Magnus.

“All these lights- aren’t they beautiful? It’s the colors of humanity, Magnus, and this is the only pretty part of it. Existence, Magnus, _life_ , Magnus, was… _is_ … horrific. It’s bloody, and it’s violent, and it’s hard. And I’m just one man trying to spare you of it.”

 _Why did we see them?_ Magnus asks in return, his body shaking furiously with the energy this takes to communicate. _Why did we go back home if you destroyed them?_

“The Light of Creation can do fantastic things.” The world shifts, and for a moment, Magnus sees a familiar light, massive and glowing. And just as quickly as it came, it fades, and Magnus can see himself again, no longer lights but standing below himself. He is on his knees. It looks like he is begging. “It was never your home, Magnus,” that voice laughs, so impossibly proud of itself. “It was a test. When Merle told me about all you people left behind… well, it broke my heart, Magnus. And so I just wanted to see how bad you’d want it back.” A disembodied chuckle rings through the hollowness of this space. Magnus’s head spins with the sheer volume of it.

 _Die_ , Magnus asks of him, his teeth gritted. He shakes his head. He repeats it to the stars as they come into view, warped and twisted through the veil of the Hunger’s skin. He can feel himself being pulled back toward the light of reality. The Hunger laughs again in a thousand voices. “If one never lived, Magnus, can they possibly?”

Magnus wakes up in the ship. His eye is swollen and puffy, throbbing in time to his heartbeat. Merle is tossed into the counter beside him, a cut plastered like a tattoo on his forehead. All around him are the sullen faces of his crew, unchanged by a year apart. Barry has his empty arms outstretched as if he was offering an embrace when he died. Lucretia is clutching at her journals.

“I almost lost them,” she breathes, her chest heaving. “When the Hunger came, I… I wasn’t... we’re so lucky.” She collapses to her knees and starts counting the journals to herself.

“Welcome back, crew,” says Davenport, turning his chair to face them. “I, uh… I stayed with the ship. Just in case something like this happened.” He makes eye contact with Magnus. They both know this is a lie, and the both of them challenge the other with their gazes. Neither cracks. Their lips stay sealed, and Davenport rubs his face into his palms. “Lucretia, this is cycle forty-two. Don’t forget to keep track. Barry, Lup, make sure everyone’s alright. Taako, check the ship for other signs of life. Magnus, stay on guard. You never know when the enemy will strike.” With that statement, Davenport drags a silence down upon the crew. He seems to notice, and turns back to face the windshield. “We’re not done yet,” Davenport says, his voice hollow. Magnus could swear he hears a sigh of relief part from Davenport’s lips.

They follow his orders. They begin to move about the ship as usual. The routine has returned, and now, is almost welcoming.

For four years after, Merle stops going to Parlay. When he returns, he starts waiting until the end of the cycle to depart. (Many years later, even Merle's unwavering patience gives out, and he tells John that he doesn’t think he wants to meet with him anymore.)

-

When the Legato Conservatory is engulfed in darkness, Davenport cries for the first time. He simply hands control of the ship over to Barry, sits on the floor, and sobs into his hands. When he finally stands, he punches the wall until his knuckles are swollen, cracked, bruised. A smear of his blood decorates the steely grey interior of the Starblaster. Magnus thinks he understands, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. He watches as Davenport sits back down and cries harder. Magnus wonders if Davenport has earned this, has earned his anger and despair and reached his breaking point. You can only swallow it down so many times before the taste makes you sick. Magnus does not know what to do, though. No one does. They stand silently, and they wait. 

As they cross through the sky, Magnus moves slowly away from Davenport to watch over Fisher instead. Lucretia joins him, silent in her motions, and they hold hands. When the waves of time warping clear from his vision, Fisher is still there. Relief washes over him.

Magnus spends three cycles sleeping on the floor of Lucretia’s cabin. Lucretia offers him the bed at some point, says she’ll just trade rooms with him until he’s finished with whatever it is that he’s doing, but Magnus refuses. He sleeps curled up on hard tile, one hand pressed to the cool glass of Fisher’s tank. Fisher, of course, sets a tendril beside his hand, too.

-

They hover over an idyllic paradise, a textbook utopia. Shadows cut across marble buildings from the humanoid statues in the center of town, and ivy grows up them, leaves fanning out in the cracks like veins of giants. Marble towers dot the surface in a sort of u-shape, all gathered around an impossibly blue lake dancing with the light of the three suns up above and the bonds that come with them, speckled with dragonflies and lily pads and reeds growing like hairs from a head. Magnus stares down the beauty and, with all he’s seen before, finds it boring.

“We have a couple of days before the light falls,” Davenport says. They’re all on the deck, staring out at this world that will be their home for a year. No one turns to face him, and so Davenport clears his throat until they do. “Do you all think that maybe we should set down there and get the lay of the land?”

Magnus shakes his head. “This place looks incredibly boring,” he responds flatly. He’s grown to hate the shifts and changes again- all of this nothingness will surely make him restless. Magnus only feels alive when he is fighting the Hunger.

Davenport shrugs almost cautiously. “I mean, I agree,” he cedes, “but they - they might, you know - there might be something that we could learn there, or you know, we could at least find out more about this world.” Magnus shrugs back. “I guess.”

“Yeaaah,” Taako chimes in, stretching out his words, “I don’t agree with Magnus’s uh… suggestion that we just leave this world to its grim fate all unaided-like. Uh, even though it could be boring, I think we should try to help them.”

“Yeah,” Merle echoes. “Let’s be humane about it.”

Magnus scoffs in return. “No no no, hold on, that’s not what I meant. I just mean I’d rather check in with the people living outside whatever this, um, “shining city on the hill” is.” Magnus has seen every form of the rich and powerful by now. And through every form, the vein of arrogance runs strong and unceasing, and Magnus isn’t sure if he can bring himself to live through another year like that. He considers tossing himself off the Starblaster, even if just to get a reaction, but decides against it. Who knows when the crew may need him.

“Uh okay,” Davenport says, shaking his head. He seems to have grown tired of their bickering despite how short-lived the conversation was. “Well, why don’t we do another low pass before we-”

Magnus watches Davenport’s wide eyes trace an arc in the sky, and then the world flashes white. Seconds later there is a sonic boom, a sound so loud it threatens to shatter the ground beneath them. The air grows hot, and the metal of the ship grows hotter, hot enough to soften the leather of Magnus’s boots. He’s sick to his stomach, and then he is nothing. Magnus passes out unceremoniously, and his last thought is that either he is falling away from the Starblaster, or the Starblaster is falling away from him.

When he opens his eyes, the world of wonder which he so flippantly gazed upon is gone. The cheery orange sky is replaced with a pale, sunless grey, blotted out by absolutely massive clouds of dust. His lungs feel heavy and polluted. He’s standing in the middle of his crew, five gathered around him. Lucretia is nowhere that he can see.

He tries to call out to her but he finds himself choked. He feels absolutely powerless for the first time in many many years.

An elvish man is standing before them. His face is nondescript, more of the idea of a face. When Magnus tries to look deeper, all he finds is emptiness.

“Hello,” he says, somewhat boredly. Magnus coughs. Davenport coughs, too, and now it’s apparent that all of his crew have woken up, as well. They all sit in silence as the man continues. “I am Prosecutor Olsen. The six of you are being tried for… hm, let’s see.” He produces a clipboard from seemingly nowhere and reads some words that look like mere scribbles of light to Magnus. Olsen clicks his tongue. “Uh, interloping, malicious intent, and violation of a no-fly zone ordinance… huh.” He clicks his tongue again and slides his clipboard back behind himself. “Now, just making sure I have your names down right for the record here: Merle, Davenport, Lup, Magnus, Barry, Take- Taaaay-ko, is it?”

“It’s Taako,” Magnus corrects before he can stop himself, his voice near a growl. He is unsure if this is due to the dirt in his lungs or his anger at being trapped on this stone pillar. He looks down. The ground itself is nowhere to be found.

Olsen quirks a fine eyebrow. “Taako it is,” he says with a sort of smirk to his voice, and he reproduces the clipboard to scribble something down. They all are silent while he does.

Finally, Olsen claps, and smiles a very forced smile. “Okay, well! This is just a preliminary hearing to establish veracity for the defense. Before I begin, how does your party plead to these charges?”

“Not guilty,” Taako says immediately, his voice also a bit worse for wear. Magnus nods and struggles to his feet. “Yeah. What he said.”

Olsen smiles to himself again and nods. “Well, we’ll begin the preliminary hearing-”

“Just a quick question, Prosecutor,” Magnus says. His anger has made him bold, and it makes the blood rush in his veins to see Olsen’s smile fall. A green light holds steady between Magnus and Olsen. Magnus, for the first time, wishes he could tear the bond down from the sky. “You must say, ‘may I address the court?’”

“I’m not addressing shit,” Magnus says. “Were you the one who shot down our ship?”

“Was I the one who what now?”

“Our ship,” Magnus repeats more sharply. “Someone blasted it. That’s how we got here. Was it you?” Beside him, Magnus can feel his crewmates tensing at the harshness of his voice. He does not let up despite it.

“Uh, that was the defense ministry,” Olsen explains vaguely. “That wasn’t me, exactly, I’m just a- you know, a prosecutor here. I don’t aim the cannons.”

“Okay.” Magnus cracks his neck. “You just saved your life.”

Olsen takes down another note, and without looking at him says, “The defense will restrain itself from threatening the court in this courtroom.”

“It wasn’t a threat,” Magnus assures him. He narrows his eyes. Olsen regards him tiredly. “If the defense continues to conduct themselves in this manner,” he says evenly, “then they will be held in contempt.”

“Magnus!” hisses Taako’s voice. He nudges him in the shoulder discreetly. “Cut it out!” Magnus can’t quite place it, but he thinks there may be a note of fear in his trembling words.

“Justices,” comes Olsen’s voice, louder than before, “I now leave it in your hands.”

Olsen steps to the edge of the stone pillar and gives a sort of goofy salute. He steps backwards off of it and disappears into the smog below.

Everyone but Magnus is still kneeling obediently. And as he turns in circles to survey their surroundings, he still cannot find Lucretia.

A voice comes from overhead, but more from inside his head. It is so reminiscent of the Hunger that it makes him nearly panic.

_You’re a long way from home, from your journey’s beginning. And still a way from your journey’s end, aren’t you?_

_The truth of this matter is already known. Speak it openly._

_Piety will be rewarded, corruption will be punished._

_None of your deeds will be kept from our divine providence. The measure of your words and deeds throughout the fullness of your lives will be considered and weighed._

Magnus goes for his axe but finds his arms bound behind his back. “Who are you?” A voice echoes back though his skull with a sort of laugh about it. _Look up, human._ Magnus follows the voice’s lead and tilts his head up. Three hulking figures hang over them, hiding them from the sky. The walls around them are not walls at all but feet, unskillfully carved, little detail but the stone straps of sandals running between two toes. He blinks the dust from his eyes and then is silent.

_I believe we’ll start with you, human._

The grey of the sky grows darker. The hazy shadows become outlines against the half light.

_Magnus. You’ve fought with others your entire life. Throughout your adolescence, you celebrated strife. Magnus, your past sins are pride and wrath. How do you plead?_

Magnus steps to the left figure, trying to shake the massive sound from his head. The silence he finds outside of the voice is almost worse. All he can hear is the labored breathing of his kneeling crewmates.

“I plead not guilty! What you call wrath, I call bravery; what you call pride, I call confidence. It’s given me the strength to do the good that I have, and accomplish the things that I’ve accomplished. To do otherwise would be to go against my own character, and that would be a far greater sin.” He stands tall, breathing heavy. The air in his chest is heavy.

The judges do not respond. Magnus nearly misses the smug face of Prosecutor Olsen. When he looks to his crew for support, all his finds are guilty glances in the opposite direction.

“Barry Blue- _jeans_ ,” the figures drone on. The voice is faroff now, no longer echoing inside his skull, and the loneliness of silence sinks in like a heavy fog.

Magnus watches as his friends are sentenced. He understands the sentences, but not why. Why them, why now, why not Lucretia. He looks at the fear in everyone’s faces and feels almost as if he’s failed.

When the sentences have finished, Olsen reappears on the podium with a flicker. He smiles that same bored smile. “Thank you for your answers, defendants. The justices will now ask a series of questions to help guide their case during your proper trial later on. Their divine providence is infallible, so I ask that you answer truthfully, please.” The booming voice returns with conviction.

_Are more of your people coming from whatever world you call home?_

They all shake their heads. “Pretty sure not,” Merle says meekly. Taako laughs uncomfortably. “Oh yeah. That ship done sailed. Literally.” He’s fumbling with his fingers behind his back, not looking at the judge. Magnus can’t blame him.

“There’s this thing that’s been chasing us,” Magnus says loudly in the direction of the heads of these figures. “It doesn’t exactly originate in our world, but it does kinda swallow up everything as it goes, so it might be bringing something of the people from our world with it, but not like we know it, not like us. Everyone that we brought with us is on this planet already.”

Olsen’s eyes get wide. “Wait,” he says, that note of ever-present boredom gone from his voice. “What are you-?”

_What is your intention for coming to our world?_

“Honestly?” Taako says, still shaky. He sits up higher on his knees. “We didn’t choose this place. We… just sort of arrived here; honestly, we didn’t even know you folks were here until, well, uh, you shot us? Which, I assume there will be a separate trial for that later? Is that—we just take it one at a time.”

“In general,” Magnus adds on, “we kind of bounce from place to place looking for a thing that we call the Light of Creation. And if we find it, it’s better; uh, if we don’t find it, it’s bad.”

Olsen takes a step forward. “Light of—light of creation? It brought you—what are you—?” He is cut off again as the voice shatters his sentence.

_We have reason to believe there may have been more crew on board your ship before it crashed. We have not located your ship to confirm this, but are we correct?_

Magnus blinks. He pauses to think about Lucretia, and then asks, “D’you mean Fisher?” There is no response, and so he pushes onward. “Fisher,” he repeats. “They’re like, they’re a jellyfish, sort of. Mostly. That’s the only other person. No one else was on the ship that I can think of… Taako?”

Taako looks at him with wide, blank eyes. And just as Magnus hoped he would not, Taako offers, “Lucretia?”

Magnus closes his eyes in exasperation. “Yes, Lucretia. Fisher and Lucretia. But they both probably died when you shot our ship…”

The idea that Fisher might have died hits him as soon as he says it. His gut wrenches. Fisher won't regenerate like the rest of them.

“Don’t worry,” Olsen cuts off his thought. “We will locate your friend and they will be tried just like the rest of you.”

“I wasn’t worried about that.” Magnus shakes off the fear and steps up toward Olsen again. “Also, when you find our ship, are you going to fix it and let us take it? Because or else everything will be pretty fucked.” Olsen has leaned back, blinking rapidly. He puts a hand on Magnus’s shoulder and pushes him back gently. “You’re Magnus, yes?” He asks, his voice steady and calm.

“Yeah.” Magnus squares his shoulders, ready to tear out of his bindings and deck Olsen right back off the platform. Olsen smiles that same tight smile. “If you’re found innocent in the proper trial of the charges set against you, of course you’ll be free to go and we will make sure you are repaid for the damages done to your vessel. So don’t worry about that as long as you all are telling the truth.”

“Is there an appellate process?” Magnus asks loudly, and Olsen shrinks back again. He shakes his head. “There’s no appealing the voice of the Justices, their providence is infallible. I don’t understand—”

The judges shift around them with shocking quickness, a sort of speed that doesn’t make sense to Magnus. He blinks, and one has knelt down beside them. He can see the age of its face, the moss growing in lines that resemble the lines of continents and coasts. The air around the face grows thicker still with dust, and Barry begins coughing wildly. Magnus can’t tear his eyes away from the eyes, too human in their stone sockets and filled with pinpricks of light like stars. Filled with bonds to people unknown.

The voice bellows into his mind again. _Merle Highchurch. Taako. Barry Bluejeans. Our providence has witnessed your past deeds and found you worthy._ Magnus hears a sigh of relief at the same time a cold pit of dread forms in his gut. He turns to Davenport and Lup and finds blank terror and a wide smile looking back.

_Davenport, Lup, and Magnus Burnsides, our providence has witnessed your past deeds and found you wanting._

“Bullshit!” Magnus moves toward the judge’s face. He struggles against his bonds. He’s sure he can break them. The judge eyes him with those celestial eyes and does not respond. His eyes swirl, and time stands completely still within them. Olsen takes a step closer to Magnus. “ The defense will restrain itself before—!”

Magnus moves his arms just right. His bonds snap. And he rushes forward.

He stops. Immediately. He tries to move more, but he is frozen. Magnus finds he can’t even move his eyes to look for what has stopped him because Magnus isn’t Magnus anymore. All the dust in his lungs solidifies, and he chokes to death on the rubble. Magnus opens his eyes into nothing.

He has died in the Hunger. And he has died alone. But never before has death been so tired and lonely.

He waits a long time for something to happen. For a long time, nothing does.

When the Hunger strikes, Magnus watches it from afar. The colors swallow his world in strings of light, glowing chaotically, almost ravenously. The Hunger feasts like a predator, like it’s spent a year stalking and now is the opportune time to strike. From his vantage point, Magnus can see millions of white eyes, can see darkness and light and color and the absence of it. He stays perfectly still as the Hunger consumes the Astral Plane, as well, and he finds himself in a familiar place. He smiles to himself. He’ll be home soon.

“Hello, Magnus.” The familiar voice rings down to his bones. Familiarity is welcome for once. He feels a strange sort of joy, as if John were an old friend. Perhaps he is.

“Hey, John.” Everything is quiet but the rush of time.

“How are you all faring, I wonder, since you all have stopped visiting me?”

“Well enough. Merle talks about you sometimes.”

“Hm.” John chuckles weakly. Magnus can hear as he smiles, the sound dull and twisting and inherently wrong. Magnus cringes away at the noise. “Well, that’s interesting.” He laughs again, brighter this time. This time, the sound is nearly human.

“Well, you spend forty years talking to someone. You’re bound to make some sort of a mark.”

“I leave much less than a _mark_ , Magnus. I leave nothing behind. Nothing in my wake. Not even destruction.”

“You don’t have to get all existential and weird every time, John.”

“Huh.” John falls silent for a moment. Magnus watches the Hunger pulsate with its colors and its bonds and its indefinite shape. John shifts slightly. “Any chance of you coming with me this time, Magnus?”

Magnus shakes his unreal head. John sighs. “That’s too bad, Magnus. It sure would be beautiful to have one of you.”

“You’re barking up the wrong tree.” And with that, John swallows him whole.

-

Magnus is lost.

He’s been lost before, but he is lost in himself now, his insides a river he does not know how to traverse. He’s scared of what he can do. What he already has done.

The chalice scares him to death. He understands _why_ it does what it does, and how that makes sense to be his burden, but. But the thinking and the wondering and the pain of creating it, that’s over now. Because now, he has it. And now, he has to hide it. That’s what he wants, honestly, to get rid of it. But it seems counterproductive to ask the chalice to destroy itself, and hell, he isn’t even sure that would work.

Really, he wants some water.

He doesn’t know where the Starblaster is anymore. Truly, he doesn’t care. He needs to sleep and to get some food in him, but he’s being dragged on by the promise of this thing, this _thing_ he made, hurting someone. Magnus never wanted to hurt anyone.

He crumples finally near a place where water maybe once ran, but years of emptiness have dried it out. He clutches his stomach. He is in pain, he is tired, he is broken. He’s ready to tear his hands to strips digging up dirt right here, burying the chalice and then himself. He can’t escape it, it seems. A band of red light ties him to it. He thinks about Lucretia, and then about the rest of the crew, and he closes his eyes.

And then, light.

“Hey, fella, need some help?”

Magnus turns quickly, like a startled beast. He’s hunched over the chalice like he’s trying to swallow the very idea of it back into his abdomen, replace his insides with it. Gods. He might as well.

A man stands with a light spell cast on the end of his wand. In his other hand, he’s holding the hand of a small girl. 

“You look pretty ragged, mister,” the man says. Magnus just stares back at him blankly. He doesn’t turn his body toward him. He keeps the chalice hidden. The stranger gently shakes away the little girl’s hand and raises his own in surrender. “Look here, I’ll drop the wand. Okay?” He sets the wand on the ground. The light casts tall shadows across the gulch’s floor. “How about you?” he asks. “You do magic?”

“No,” Magnus says slowly. “No, I’m a fighter.” He stays hunched over the chalice but turns. The stranger smiles, but it is strained and uncomfortable. “Well, I’m Jack,” he says. “This here’s my daughter June. Wave to him, sweetpea.” The little girl shoots her father a confused look but raises a hand. She waves quickly, and then tucks the hand away as if she’s done something wrong. She looks to her father again, and he reassures her with a quick bump of his hip. Golden light illuminates the two of them, friendly and welcoming. Their entire bodies are tied together with an endless string of light.

Magnus considers this. Considers the two in front of him and his mission, the little girl and her frightened wave. He thinks about how he must look to them, how terrifying and bedraggled. He doesn’t want to scare a little girl, for the gods sakes. He straightens up and holds out the chalice to them.

Jack’s eyes widen. His mouth falls open a little, and he pulls June closer to his side. One of his hands extend slightly, and Magnus knows what it's doing to him. He understands the crave. And he smiles.

“I’m Magnus,” he says. “You two got any water?”

-

Magnus puts the finishing touches onto a small, carved duck. It isn’t much, but it’s better than his first one. It’s better than every other one he’s made thus far, really, and he’s rather proud of it. He’s painted this one too, his first time trying his hand at painting, and it’s sloppy and a little smudged from where his thumb made contact before it was completely dry. He’s happy with it, and that’s the real point. It doesn’t matter that it’s nothing much. It’s just a little gift for Lucretia.

Lucretia’s been locked away a lot lately, the “DO NOT DISTURB” sign Magnus carved her hanging crooked from her doorknob night and day. Her room is across from his, and so sometimes he hears little noises. He hears the rustling of paper, Fisher sloshing about in his tank. He misses Lucretia, is what he thinks this really is. Her cautious smile, her gentle touches and her ability to ignore all of his little stunts and pranks. Magnus doesn’t blame her, really. Since Lup disappeared, everything has been tenser, everyone on eggshells. For a week, Taako had done the same, closed in his room with nothing but himself and angry fists which pounded at the walls at night. When he finally emerged, a new sense of determination came with him. He and Barry search for her endlessly, are out on the deck of the Starblaster now. Magnus has high hopes for Lucretia. Perhaps, when she emerges, she’ll feel better, too.

Lucretia has been taking it the hardest, really. Magnus knows the pain caused by his artifact, too, but he feels safe having left it with Jack and June. He knows they can protect it. He doesn’t know where Lucretia put the staff, but he is entirely sure it’s safe too. They’ve done what they needed to do. They’ve already saved the world. All that’s left to do is wait. Magnus wishes Lucretia didn’t have to wait as long as she is.

He knocks on her door. There’s no answer.

He knocks again. He hears Fisher blare out a couple notes to him, but no response from Lucretia. She must be sleeping, he decides. He tries the knob, and it whirls around just as it should. The door creaks open, just a bit.

Magnus pauses. But really, it couldn’t hurt to leave it on her desk and head right back out. He pushes open the door and rushes in.

Lucretia is standing before Fisher’s tank, her head tilted upward. Fisher hangs near the top, something wrapped in their tendrils. The only light in the room is a cool blue that emanates from Fisher’s body.

Lucretia turns to him. Tears streak her face. A red bond ties them together, now endless, streaking out the door and to the front room of this nameless ship. But her face… it’s slowly fading into nothing. That fish in the tank, that strange thing he’s never seen, it consumes the journal, a blue, leather-bound one which he’s never seen before. Very suddenly, Magnus can feel things leaving him: the power bear and his soccer team and the chalice and his _family_ , all of it blurs before his eyes and then is gone. The woman standing in front of him is walking to him now, her unfamiliar arms wrapping against around him and against his pins and needles skin.

“God, Magnus, no… You weren’t supposed to see this.” She’s shaking her head. Why is she shaking her head? Why is she crying? “I’m so sorry, Magnus.” The words all sound strange in her mouth, like she’s choking them up. Magnus doesn’t understand.

“What did you do?” he asks, and that doesn’t make any sense because he’s never seen her before, never seen her do anything. The room around them is collapsing into static now, and he can’t see… he can’t see… what was he seeing a moment ago that he can’t see now?

“Magnus, please, I- this is just for a little bit, I’m gonna stop this, what we’ve done to this world. I’m gonna find you a place where you can be happy again, it’s just for a little while, and then, you’ll remember, I promise.” She’s crying into his chest, and he wants to push her away. He doesn’t even know her. How does she know his name? But despite what he wants, all of him is so heavy. It is all he can do to open his mouth and slur, “Who are you?”

“I can do this, Magnus,” she says, and she pulls back with a determined look on her face. That look is split as she’s wracked by another sob, and she shakes her head. “Please just lie down, I don’t want you to fall and hurt yourself.” Magnus nods, dazed. He does feel like he’s going to keel over. He sinks to his knees, and she lets out a breath of relief. She wraps her arms around him again, kneels before him. She takes his face into her hands and holds him to her chest.

“I love you, Magnus,” she says, her voice merely an echo. “I love all of you. I’m sorry. It’ll be over soon.” Her voice is fading away into the darkness. Magnus doesn’t know this ‘all’ she’s referring to. And his last thought is to wish she’d stop saying his name. Stop saying she loves him. She’s nothing more than a stranger, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hannah's hottest new chapter has everything: davenport sadness, death, magnus talking to the hunger, taako being emotional about people dying.
> 
> this chapter got real outta hand! i couldn't just... not write 14k about the ipre mission .... there's so much unexplored territory.
> 
> once again, comments, kudos, and just reading is so appreciated. ive been real insecure about my writing recently, and so everything means so much to me. mwah (das me givin kisses)


	3. kalen

Magnus's vision comes back slowly, like a curtain drawing upward, and he recognizes that he is on his back. He blinks up at one sun soaring high above him, the sky a gentle blue speckled with white clouds. He times his shallow breathing to the waves of light dancing between the the birds fluttering by, the clouds to each particle of water within them. There’s so much unfamiliar ground beneath his body. He has the remnants of a headache weighing his eyes down, making the light painful. He lifts one hand and squints. He tries desperately to place two and two together. He’s awake. He doesn’t remember going to sleep, but he’s awake now, and here is where he is. Where is _here_?

And then his vision is shadowed by a figure.

“Who the hell decides to take a nap on the outskirts of town?”

Magnus tries to sit up but finds his body like lead, like he’s heavier than he remembers being. Much _bigger_ than he remembers being. Dear gods, what’s the last thing he remembers? His mouth moves wordlessly for a moment, and then he says, “I’m… I’m Magnus Burnsides.” Not what he meant to say, but was all his brain could puzzle together. A large figure blots out the sun. “Well, that’s nice, mister. But I was- hey.” He feels the figure crouch next to him. “I don’t recognize you. Are you from around here?”

“I… I don’t know?” He shakes his head a few times and manages to sit up. He looks the figure speaking to him up and down, but his vision is still cloudy and he can’t quite make them out. Still, Magnus manages a shaky smile. “I’m Magnus Burnsides,” he repeats, because that’s all that he’s really sure of.

The figure giggles and nudges his arm with a little too much strength. “S’that all you know to say, mister Magnus Burnsides? Did you hit your head or something?” There is slight concern laced up in that voice, that voice which Magnus now registers must belong to a woman. Her figure stoops further down and out of the sunlight, and the fog clears enough for him to see her. There’s a massive woman next to him, her skin dotted with freckles and a crescent shaped scar on her cheek. She’s blinking big pretty eyes down at him. And for what is definitely not the first time in the past two minutes, Magnus is entirely dumbstruck.

“I…” Magnus looks around. There’s not really anything for him to have hit his head on here other than the sun-hardened earth. He reaches up to touch his hair, and there's no dirt in it. He didn’t fall. He was put here.

As Magnus puzzles this out in his heat-fogged mind, he figures that the stranger must be realizing these things, too. If she is, she doesn’t say anything, just raises a thick eyebrow in his direction. Magnus feels his gut trembling in an unfamiliar manner as he says, with a massive goofy smile, “Uh. Hi.”

This woman laughs again, and she shakes her head. “Well, regardless,” she says, and offers Magnus a hand. “The name’s Julia. Julia Waxman. Nice to meet you, mister Magnus. Welcome to Raven’s Roost.”

“Magnus,” he repeats dumbly because he’s not used to hearing his own name in such a lovely voice. “I… Yeah. Nice, um, nice to meet you, too, Julia.” He takes her hand after wiping sweat off his own onto his pant leg. His hand is cut slightly but already healing. He smiles. And Julia smiles back, wide.

Julia pulls him upright with shockingly little effort, and Magnus's gut protests fiercely at the movement. He pushes her hand away with what little sense he has, doubles over and vomits onto the dirt. She says, “Woah!”, and then puts a hand on his shoulder as if to steady him. Magnus spits a few times and then stands back up. He sees Julia looking at him, and trying to seem cool, he smiles. His mouth pulls awkwardly to the side with the intensity of his grin.

“What a stunner,” Julia scoffs, and Magnus is just barely present enough to know that she’s not being genuine. He just keeps smiling, albeit a bit more shyly now. They start to walk toward the not-so distant settlement that Magnus can see toward the South. Julia refers to it as Raven’s Roost, and her voice calls it home without ever saying as much.

“Raven’s Roost’s not your home, is it, mister?” she asks. He shakes his head. Julia furrows her eyebrows. “Where’d you come from then?” He shakes his head again. She continues to probe: how’d you get here, what happened to you, where and who’s your family. Magnus shakes his head harder and harder, something akin to panic building in his throat as he finds himself unable to answer.

“Don’t remember anything,” he says. “Don’t know anything.” With that, Julia falls silent. They walk quietly for a stretch.

“I can’t bring you home, I don’t think,” she tells him finally. “Papa wouldn’t like it if I showed up with a half-dressed hunk of meat like yourself.” Magnus ducks his head and blushes. He’s not sure if he’s ever been called a hunk of meat before, but he thinks he likes it when Julia says it. They stay quiet for another long moment until Julia touches his arm with a little more force than is entirely necessary and he turns back to her. Her head is tilted, eyes flooded with concern. “Can’t you talk any more, mister Magnus?” Her voice wobbles like she’s worried. 

“Just Magnus is fine,” he advises, and then starts because that’s the first real coherent thing he’s said. She smiles, and the concern parts from her face in the form of a massive sigh. “Alright. Well where exactly are you supposed to be, Magnus?”

“I don’t know,” he tells her again. “I can’t… I don’t remember.” When he tries to, the sensation of buzzing flies fills his mind. He cringes. He’s always hated flies. Then he realizes he’s had that thought and finds his own relief.

“Well, then.” She smiles softly. “Guess I don’t have nowhere to take you still.” They’ve reached the town’s gate, a sturdy sign with _RAVEN’S ROOST_ burned into it. Julia stands before him and tugs his jacket straight, trying to make him look presentable. “If you’re gonna be seen with me,” she says, “you gotta look like a good man. Fix your hair.” Magnus sticks his hands into it haphazardly and ruffles it. Julia sighs heavily. “Not like that, you goof,” she says and then takes it upon herself to smooth it back into a neat swoop. Magnus feels a strange sensation that tells him his hair has never looked like this before. Julia steps back and admires her handywork, and then tugs one of his lapels over a little. “You got a rip there,” she says, pointing to his left breast, and Magnus frowns. That’s where his badge should be. And he thinks that and immediately his mind turns to flies.

“Thank you,” he says after a while, when they’ve already passed through the gates. Julia waves one large hand absentmindedly. “Don’t mention it.” Magnus thinks about mentioning it anyway, about mentioning the way he can’t tear his eyes away from her or the endless cascade of her curls or about the way her voice hangs sharply in the air and rings in his static bones. About how he can’t look away from her, or about the blue string of light tied in a hovering bow between their chests. He thinks about mentioning it. And then he doesn’t.

Julia guides him through the streets of Raven’s Roost. As she does, Magnus continues to observe her quietly, almost as if he’s taking notes for a far-off test. She’s tall, to say the least, _incredibly_ tall to say more. She stands several inches above Magnus, although her hair does lend a bit of height. Magnus notices small, mundane things about her- her cream colored apron. The red bandana in her dark hair. The crooked slant of her nose and the dimple permanently seated in her left cheek. He’s still staring when she turns back to him, and he startles into a very inelegant spin in the other direction. He even adds a nonchalant whistle, just to assure her that he was _not_ looking at her longingly. Julia laughs at him, loud and bold. It sounds like coming home.

“I got a plan,” she assures him a few minutes later when he asks where they’re going. “And you don’t know these streets anyhow, so don’t bother yourself with it.” She’s right. Magnus kind of adores that she’s right. They turn down dizzying, winding sidestreets, past apple orchards and wooden cottages and farm animals kept in chicken wire pens. He absorbs it all, and begins to fall desperately in love with the town unfolding around him.

“Here we are,” Julia tells him finally. They’re standing outside a modest looking home, certainly not one of the nicer ones they’ve seen. It’s built shakily and without much skill. Magnus notes this immediately, and makes a mental checklist of things he could patch up, what he could improve upon. Julia notes his gaze and laughs loudly as she knocks on the door.

“Jeez,” she says, crossing her arms. “Maybe I oughta introduce you to papa anyways, the way you’re looking at that door frame.” Magnus doesn’t have much of a chance to parse her statement before the door is swinging open. Standing in the open doorway is a small man, much smaller than Magnus and positively dwarfed by Julia. He’s rather young in the face with red-brown freckles dotting porcelain cheeks. Light hair swoops across his forehead, and he pushes it back from his face incessantly. A red string ties his hands to Magnus's neatly. Magnus has never seen a _red_ bond before. Even knowing that, its presence makes him smile. It makes him feel safe with this man for some reason that he cannot comprehend.

“Julia?” the man says, the same sort of southern twang on his voice. Julia gestures to Magnus. “Gotcha a gift. Turn around a lil bit, mister Magnus, let him see the whole package.” Magnus looks at her confused but the man in the doorway stops him in his tracks, fortunately before he can do any turning. “Real funny, Julia,” he says. “What’re you doin’ here with a strange man? I oughta tell your daddy.”

“No need, Kalen. I just found him.” She puts one big hand on the small of Magnus's back. “He was on the outskirts’a town and couldn’t tell a hawk from a handsaw. He bumped his head or somethin, can’t remember a thing. He needs a place to stay.” This man that she called Kalen furrows his light-colored eyebrows. “And so you decided to come to me?” he asks incredulously. Julia just gives a firm nod. “Yup.” She pops the ‘p’ on the end. Kalen frowns and answers, “Why not the Merics? They’ve got room, too.” He starts to swing the door shut. Julia stops it with one hand, eyes sharp and steely, and Magnus thinks he just might fall for her.

“You owe me an’ papa a favor,” she says pointedly. She stares Kalen down, and finally he cedes. He opens the door up again. “Come on in, Magnus,” he says. “You’ve got a lot of explainin’ to do.”

-

Julia takes Magnus inside and sits him down at a round, well-crafted table. “So this is Kalen,” she tells him when Kalen parts the room for a moment. “He’s a good, honest man. You can stay with him, an’ he’ll treat you right. I’ll check in ‘bout a month from now, and you oughta be gone by then. Got it?” Magnus nods with wide eyes. It feels impossible to tell Julia no, even as he doubts the legitimacy of her kind statements about Kalen. Every time she speaks his name, her expression sours slightly. It’s just enough to make him suspicious.

“A’right, Julia and Magnus,” comes Kalen’s voice, approaching from another room. “Tell me all about your little journey.” Magnus opens his mouth to answer but is cut off as Julia hollers back. “We already told you everything. His brain’s mush in there. He needs some food to fix him up.”

“Food?” Kalen reappears in the doorway. “I can make some food, then. And I can keep him here, too, if he really needs it.” Kalen gestures toward a chair. “How ‘bout you, Julia? You hungry?”

“I’ll pass,” Julia says, and then eyes him carefully. “Kalen.” She tacks the word on like an afterthought, a word that means nothing to Magnus but must mean something to the two of them with the way they look at each other. Julia steps carefully back to the kitchen door. It seems almost as if she does not want to be around Kalen.

“Suit yourself,” Kalen shrugs. And so Julia does, giving a friendly wave goodbye to Magnus and absolutely nothing to Kalen. Magnus watches her leave distractedly as Kalen steps deeper into the kitchen.

Kalen seems nice though, now that Magnus has had a moment alone with him. Kalen acts kindly and with a friendly demeanor, opening up his home to Magnus albeit with slight hesitation. He stirs around the kitchen. Comfort food, he tells Magnus, does a mind good. It should help with his memory.

The open window swings cheerily with the breeze, emitting a faint screeching sound as it moves. Without much thought, Magnus says, “I could fix this squeaky window for you,” and Kalen’s eyes light up. “You’re a buildin’ man?” he asks, and Magnus is surprised to find himself nodding. 

“Yeah, I… I guess I am.” His memories are starting to come back to him. Yeah, maybe Magnus was a carpenter. His hands are calloused in a way that supports this vague memory, and support is just what he needs right now. He relays this bit of information to Kalen, who brightens the room with his proud beam. 

 

“I’m glad your memories’re comin’ around,” he says. “And y’know, there’s a man in town lookin’ for an apprentice. Steven Waxman, that’s his name. Lookin’ for a man a lot like you, Magnus.” Kalen sticks his hands on his hips, shoulders squared and elbows poked out to indicate someone of larger size. Magnus laughs a bit. Steven’s name is oddly familiar but, if he’s being honest, Magnus can barely remember five minutes back right now. His brain feels like someone has cut holes into it.

Kalen has paused, one hand buried behind a cabinet door and fumbling for a cup to get Magnus water. “Where ya from, Magnus?” he asks suddenly, startling Magnus from his thoughts. 

“Oh, that. Yeah, I still don’t remember that,” Magnus admits. “But, uh.” He furrows his eyebrows, trying desperately to remember. He peels back through his mind- girlfriends, a best friend of his with a fuzzy face. And then, himself, on his back, covered in dirt and bruises. A dog licking his face. The memory is painful, but more importantly, it is clear. He takes a moment to recover. “Uh,” he says again. “Wherever I was from, we had… we had dogs.”

“Dogs?” Kalen chuckles, pulling a grey mug out. “Well, I’m afraid to tell you _everywhere_ has dogs. ‘Cept maybe, I dunno. The moon.”

“Not from the moon then,” Magnus jokes. “That’s one place off the list.” Kalen laughs in response, setting the mug down in front of Magnus. “I like you, Magnus. Now I know I already made the offer, but I’d like you to stay a while. At least ‘til you get your mind straight.” He’s gone back to bustling about the kitchen, making some sort of food. Magnus downs his water in one gulp and considers the offer.

Kalen shrugs after some time, pouring oil in a pan. “You don’t gotta pay nothin’,” he says. “Just help me out with that squeaky window, maybe a couple’a other little things. It’ll be nice to have some extra help around.” He turns back to Magnus. “And once you’re done helpin’ me, I’ll get you in with Steven.” He moves to the side, chopping a carrot. He tosses a slice into his mouth. “Sound good to you, Magnus?”

“That sounds fantastic,” Magnus answers honestly. His stomach rolls over itself, gurgling noisily, and he realizes he can’t remember when he last ate. He gives a bright smile. “And that smells pretty good, too.” Kalen laughs again through a mouthful of orange mush. When he stops, he stirs the pan with one loose hand on a wooden spoon. “You’re gonna love Raven’s Roost, you know,” he says. Magnus raises an eyebrow as if he hasn’t already begun to fall for the charm of this town. “I am, am I?” he challenges.

“‘Course,” Kalen assures. “After all, it’s the best place on the planet.” He grins. “And the governor’s pretty great, too, if I do say so myself.” He chuckles as if he’s made a joke, and then Kalen turns back to his pan, humming softly.

Magnus looks out the window. Outside, birds flutter softly in hot breeze, sun beating down on the columns that make up the town. People cross rickety bridges and laugh, talk, embrace. The red dirt of the ground crumbles gently away, falls into the abyss below. Perhaps, it is a warning.

-

“You can sleep right on here,” Kalen says. “Used to belong to my pops, ‘fore he kicked it.”

Kalen has pulled out a mattress from a crammed storage room, yellowing at the edges with age. He asks for Magnus's help pulling it through his own doorway and settling it atop the knitted carpet on his bedroom floor.

Magnus stands awkwardly in the doorway as Kalen goes about setting the bed, placing a sheet and two feather pillows on it. He watches the string of scarlet light that connects he and Kalen together swing almost playfully with his movements. It dyes the floor blood red with the glow it casts. Magnus looks around in the meantime. This house seems too small and hollow to have ever housed anyone but Kalen.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” Magnus says anyway, unsure of what else to say. Kalen waves a hand dismissively. “Naw, naw, don’t be. He had his time.” He pulls the sheet back to expose a corner of the mattress and shakes his head. “He’s long gone, anyhow. ‘Splains why this bed is so damn musty.”

He pats it and, as if to prove his point, a shower of dust flies out. Kalen grimaces and pulls the sheet back into place. “I’m gonna go ahead and grab you an extra sheet to toss over this, but there’s nothin’ I can do about the dust smell. You’re just gonna have to live with that.” He stands and marches out of the room, back to his linen closet.

Magnus looks around. Kalen’s room is much like his eyes, small and dark and nothing to write home about at first glance. On his table, he has a picture of him with a sword, cutting a big ribbon in half. He’s much younger in that picture, hardly an adult at all. His hair is shorter now. Beyond that, Kalen’s got certificates on his wall, ones that say he went to Goldcliff University, that he’s received awards and been honored. Magnus is a bit startled and intimidated by this. He didn’t go to university. He doesn’t remember if he did, at least. What if Kalen thinks he’s thick-skulled or something?

There’s another picture on his table, small enough that Magnus has to pick it up to see. It’s Kalen standing at the gates of a town called Refuge, a big smile on his face. Behind him is a statue, tall and broad-shouldered and yet very simple. It is of three figures, a father, a daughter, and a third red-robed man, but when Magnus tries to decipher _who_ exactly that is, his brain goes suddenly, painfully empty. It is as if something has ripped the memory away from him, and like a child, he is fighting for it back. He can’t stand that feeling, but can’t help thinking there’s something in the photo he still is missing.

“Got’ya the thickest sheet I can find,” comes Kalen’s voice, startling him away from the picture. Kalen comes in just a second before he can find it in himself to put it down, and whatever is showing on Magnus's face makes Kalen laugh.

“No need to feel guilty, Magnus. You look like an elf caught rubbin’ their ears. It’s a nice picture, ain’t it?”

“Yeah,” Magnus stutters. He rubs his temples, the fuzzy feeling still lingering. Hoping to shake it away, he asks, “What’s it of?”

“Well, you know, it’s me with the statue in Refuge. They say that the visitor met Ja-”

Kalen’s voice dissolves into static. Magnus feels his blood ice over.

Kalen’s mouth is moving, but no words come. Instead, radio silence pours from his lips, burrows into Magnus's brain like a dozen Dire Badgers are ripping their way into his skull. He squeezes his eyes shut and covers his ears. The static only gets louder as he is left alone with his thoughts. Magnus, with what feels like the last of his sense, asks for it to stop.

“Magnus, hey! Calm it down!” Magnus reopens his eyes to Kalen inches from his face. Being called for so desperately is familiar. Familiar, but not too familiar. He gulps in a deep breath and starts to recover, but Kalen’s concern doesn’t fade. “Magnus, buddy, what just happened to you?” His eyes are wide and face gone colorless, his hands shaking where he’s gripping Magnus by the collar of his jacket. His knuckles are white with the strength of his grip. Magnus smiles weakly.

He has no idea what this is. Whatever this static in his brain is, he cannot comprehend it. So he decides that what he has to do is something he’d never do under any other circumstances. “I uh…” He fumbles with words for a moment, which he supposes is believable. Anyone would be at a loss for words after this. He shrugs finally and crosses his fingers behind his back as he lies.

“I got some memories back. I was in a war and I… I remembered my friends dying.” Kalen’s face goes from concerned to sympathetic. The words Magnus spoke hang all too familiar in his mouth, but he can’t imagine why. He’s never been in a war, after all.

Kalen’s grip loosens, and he offers a pat on the shoulder instead. “I’m sorry for your loss, Magnus,” he says. “We can change the subject now if you wanna.” He doesn’t ask what war, and Magnus is happy to oblige by not telling him.

“Yeah,” Magnus says quickly, eager to bury his lie. He points to the wall. “I saw your certificates. You went to Goldcliff University?”

“Yeah, ya heard of it?” Kalen responds, a big smile already splitting his face like he expects Magnus's answer. Magnus smiles back and gives him what he wants, saying, “Well, yeah. It’s the biggest university in Faerun.”

“Second to Neverwinter University, actually,” Kalen corrects, “but I’d never get accepted there. I was already lucky enough to get into Goldcliff.” He shrugs, and then goes back to putting sheets on Magnus's bed. “Nice job rememberin’ that, though. Get over here an’ help me put on these sheets.” Magnus nods and then moves to the other side of the bed to assist.

“What’d you study?” Magnus asks, figuring this is the logical progression of the conversation. Kalen tucks one edge of the sheet below the mattress with apparent difficulty. “Law,” he drawls easily, as if that’s common. Kalen stands up. “I wanted to be the governor, you know. I always wanted to change some things about this town. The way it treated people.”

“That sounds nice,” Magnus says, pretending he knows anything at all about that. Kalen nods. “Sure is.” Magnus tucks the other end under the bed, lifting the mattress easily. “Did you ever, uh, _become_ governor?”

Kalen looks back at him suddenly, meeting his eye. After a moment spent staring, he laughs heartily, doubling over and clutching his sides. Magnus watches and laughs along uncomfortably, unsure of what he’d said. When Kalen’s laughing fit is over, he scrubs at one of his eyes, grinning. “There’s a lot we don’t know about each other, huh, Magnus?”

Magnus feels as if he’s been left out of a joke. Even so, he’s desperate to please Kalen for reasons he cannot comprehend. He wonders if this is just because his father was always a little too harsh on him, and then smiles that he’s remembered that. Not exactly a pleasant memory, but a memory nonetheless.

“Sure is,” Magnus echoes in a poor impression of Kalen’s accent. Kalen slaps him in the arm in just the right place to make static explode across his skin. He’s felt that touch before, he’s sure of it. Magnus shivers off the feeling. “Let’s go get some grub,” Kalen is saying now, and Magnus is more than happy to leave the conversation behind.

-

“Magnus?” comes Kalen’s voice through the darkness, not that night but the next. They both settled down for bed nearly an hour ago.

“...Yeah?” Magnus rolls over in his makeshift bed, much too small for him. He’s already begun building a frame for it. He hears Kalen shifting too, and then his voice is much closer, like he’s hanging over the side of his bed. Outside, the moon gleams a mere sliver in the sky.

“How much you remembering now, Magnus?” He sounds genuinely concerned. Earlier that day, he’d brought Magnus into town and had the doctor look at him. She’d prodded him with sharp claws all over and stated that beside the scrapes and a minor case of dehydration, he looked fine.

“Not much,” Magnus admits. “I feel like…” He fumbles with his words, careful to not mention the static. “Like there’s some holes in my memory, but maybe those holes were already there. You know?”

There is a pause, and then the sound of bed springs creaking. Kalen seems to relax as he says, “Yeah. I know.” He goes quiet again. Magnus listens to the sharp croak of crickets outside, the stiff breeze of Raven’s Roost sliding in the open window like a snake. Kalen’s voice splits the silence once more, saying, “You wanna play a game?”

Magnus is moments from sleep. He grunts and says, “It’s pretty late, Kalen.”

“No, really.” Magnus's eyes have adjusted enough to see Kalen sit up in bed and shake his head vaguely. “I’m being serious here, Magnus. C’mon, it’ll help you fall asleep.”

Magnus doesn’t _need_ help falling asleep. Something in him still compels him to say, “Alright. Sure.”

“A’right,” Kalen says, and there’s a soft smack as he claps and rubs his hands together. “It’s kinda just a word association game. It’ll help jog your memory a bit. So, you know. I say one, you say one.”

“Alright,” Magnus says again. He just wants to get this over with. Kalen faces him through the dark, Magnus can feel his eyes on him. He puts his hands together and says, “Suck.”

“Swallow,” says Magnus in response automatically. Kalen clicks his tongue to his teeth and says, “Magnus, what the hell.”

“I dunno,” Magnus defends over Kalen’s complaints of how this is supposed to be serious. After a moment of protest, Kalen shuts up and tries again. “Alrighty. Once again, suck.”

“Straws,” Magnus answers. “Dogs.”

“Allergic. Cats.”

“Good. Uh, winter?”

“Not in Raven’s Roost. Stays summer the whole year ‘round.” Kalen snickers at his own joke. “Feel free to give longer answers, Magnus. This is for you, not me. Keep.”

“Journals. Seven?”

“Birds.” Kalen shrugs. “My momma used to keep chickens. One of ‘em was named Seven. Lost.”

“Me,” Magnus jokes, but Kalen doesn’t laugh. He stays silent and waits until Magnus drops his smile and says, “Red.”

“Your jacket. Jelly.”

“Fish. Space.”

“Ship.” Kalen seems to be running out of words. He rubs his thumb across his neck repeatedly, a sort of tick that Magnus has noticed. He finds it endearing. “I dunno. Journey.”

“Planes. Horse?”

Kalen squints and says, “Divorce.” Magnus chortles into his palm as Kalen says, “Blue.”

Magnus is capable of making a sort of, “Jea-” sound with his mouth before his mind is plagued with static. He crosses his arms over his chest and rocks a little, hoping the repetitive motion will soothe him. All it does is make him spiral, his brain growing darker and darker as he tries harder and harder to figure out why the hell he can’t say the word _bluejea-_

Kalen is looking down at him, eyes wide through the dark “Magnus?” he asks, somewhat shakily, but Magnus is already lying back down, shivering, cold and inexplicably lonely.

“I- I think I’m done with this game for tonight,” he mutters, offering no real explanation. Kalen makes a ‘hmph’ noise but still answers gently with, “M’kay. We can always play again if that worked on your memory at all.” Magnus makes an affirmative noise, but never wants to play it again if he can help it. He figures there might be a good reason he’s forgotten things.

-

Magnus is up on a ladder, retiling Kalen’s roof, and Kalen is not home. He disappears for cryptic reasons fairly often these days, returns with some fancy wine or a new watch or a paper bag filled with coins. Magnus told him goodbye this morning and Kalen had just said, “I’ll bring you back a little something,” before he disappeared, his short legs taking equally short strides out the kitchen door.

Magnus is lost in thought, replaying what he can remember, trying to drill it down in his brain. He remembers Huxley and Nell, remembers his mother and his father and the bullies who nearly killed him. He remembers childhood, picking up an axe for the first time and immediately dropping it on his toe. He remembers adolescence, all the awkward sweating and clumsy kisses, his graceless body and his inconsolably angry hands. He even remembers his twenty-first birthday, drinking with Huxley and getting his first real hangover. He remembers the light from his chest stretching toward the sky endlessly.

And then, immediately after, he is missing time.

Magnus isn’t sure how long the time that he can’t remember is. It only feels like it could be a year at two or most as he doesn’t age visibly throughout the memories, but the snippets he does have in those years seem impossible for such a short time. He has surfing and delicious food and learning to carve, but all of it is in different places. He tries to shrug it off. Maybe he traveled a lot to build things for different people.

A sharp whistle startles him into dropping some tiles off the roof. They hit the sun-baked ground below and shatter. He swears loudly and starts down the ladder. Probably some stupid bird, he thinks. There’s all these dumb birds in Raven’s Roost. He’s growing more attached to this place day by day, but all these birds give him a bad vibe. Maybe something happened to him involving a bird, he doesn’t know. He reaches the ground and starts to pick up the mess.

“Hey mister?”

Magnus looks back to the voice, and in that moment fate finds him because there is a girl standing a few feet out of Kalen’s yard, her hands clasped neatly before her. And Magnus recognizes Julia immediately.

“Mister?” she repeats again, that soft twang carrying her voice through the air like a song. She steps a little closer, cautious, and waves one big hand in Magnus's face. “Are you alright there?” 

“Huh? Yeah!” Magnus startles out of his silence and startles her, too. She jumps back a bit, but quickly recovers and laughs, recognition filling her eyes. “Well. If it ain’t mister Magnus.” A grin too wide and crooked splits her face. “You ain’t governor Kalen, though, and that’s who I was looking for.”

“You neither,” Magnus quips, and then laughs too hard at his own joke. His insides have gone squirmy. His face is red hot. After a moment, he realizes what was said and questions, “Governor?” Julia raises an eyebrow, and Magnus can kind of tell that she thinks he’s an idiot for asking that. “Well, yeah,” she says with the same tone that someone might say _duh_. She gestures to the house. “I mean, this _is_ where the governor lives.” Magnus is rightfully confused. Kalen mentioned studying and wanting to be governor, but surely Kalen would’ve told him. Surely Julia herself would have told him when she first led him here. She must be confusing this house with another. While he thinks this, Julia is looking down at the shattered roofing and nudges it with the toe of her boot. “You visiting?”

“No,” Magnus says. “I, uhm. I live here?” He’s not sure that’s the right answer, or if he technically does live here. He’s been here nearly a month, after all. Julia looks back up with wide eyes. “You’re still livin’ with Kalen?”

“I… yeah.” 

“Well, gods bless you,” she says. “I woulda gotten tired of his big mouth after a week.” Magnus laughs shakily in response and moves to scratch his neck, forgetting that he’s holding shards of tile. They fall from his hand and tumble down his back, scratching him. He jumps at first, and then smiles sheepishly and says, “Ow.” Julia smiles and offers him a handshake. He takes it gladly. “It’s been a while since I seen you,” she says. “How’s your head?”

“Better,” he says. “Clearer. Remembering more.”

“Know where you came from now?”

“No,” he responds, and Julia clicks her tongue. “Damn shame. I’d like to meet more of you.”

“Oh,” Magnus stutters. “Uh. Thank you.”

“No need for thanks, mister Magnus,” she says. “But my dogs just ran around your house there and I’d like to get them back from your yard.”

“Oh, you can go get them,” he assures somewhat clumsily, and then is bold enough to tack on, “as long as I can go see them, too?”

“Sure,” Julia says, still smiling. She nods toward their hands. “You’ll have to let go of me first, of course.” 

“Oh!” Magnus pulls back his hand like he’s been burned, all of that boldness slipping away like water through his fingers. He laughs awkwardly. “Heh, uh, silly me. I forgot we were… yeah.” He clears his throat and gestures to his house. “Lead the way, miss Julia.”

“Just Julia is fine by me,” she tells him, and then she puts two fingers to her lips. That whistle which had startled him before explodes into the air once more. Only this time, Magnus hears a faint jingling follow, rapidly getting louder. From the edge of the house, two squat figures rush toward them, jingling all the way. Julia falls to her knees.

“Hey, lovelies!” she coos, and then looks up to Magnus. “D’you wanna pet ‘em?”

“Yeah!” Magnus says again, and he crouches down beside her. One is a pitbull who looks to almost be smiling as Julia rubs it behind its short ears. The other is a Scottish Deerhound who approaches Magnus, sniffing at him before bursting into a fit of barks.

“Duck, quiet down!” she scolds, but still sounds so gentle. She smiles warmly at Magnus. “He’s a bit spooked of strangers.”

“That’s okay,” Magnus says, and he gently scratches Duck on the left side of his chest bone. Duck’s barking decreases in volume, and then ceases completely.

“That’s pretty incredible there, Magnus,” Julia smiles. Magnus grins back, fully aware that his face has gone hot and dark with blush, and Julia addressing him directly sends his mind into overdrive as he stutters out, “Yeah! Yeah, it- I mean, it works on _most_ dogs. I mean, I never had dogs, personally, but it’s worked on all the ones I’ve tried. I love dogs, and the fact that you have dogs is really cool! I wish I had-”

“Mister Magnus,” she interrupts softly. She pushes a stray piece of hair back out of his face, and her hand lingers on his cheek. “You’re rambling,” she points out, very matter-of-factly but still so gentle. Magnus blinks, and knows she is right. His chest feels tight and hot, his fingers wobbly as he keeps scratching Duck. Julia is so close to him, close enough that he sees the tiny dark freckles that dot her cheeks. Close enough that he can see darker brown lines in her brown eyes, and the frizz of her curls. He just… there’s something about her. He can’t not look at her.

“I’ve gotta go now,” she says, just as soft. “But I, uh. I hope I see you around town.” She reaches her hand out again and Magnus takes it. They shake once more. Her palms are callus. Strong.

“It was nice seeing you again, mister Magnus,” she says. “Remind governor Kalen that he’s got a good, kind man living with him. And for the love of the gods, get yourself a dog.” She smiles, her lips curving beautifully with it. Her hand slips out of his. She walks down the road, both dogs in tow. That blue light follows after her, a shock of electricity, a promise of something more to come. And Magnus watches after her until she is gone again.

-

Kalen comes home much later that night. Magnus is still awake at the kitchen table, carving.

“Brought ya something,” Kalen says, and he tosses a brown paper bag on the table. Magnus hums but doesn’t respond. Kalen steps closer, tilting his head to see the item from Magnus's point of view. “What’re you makin’ there?”

“A duck,” Magnus say flatly. He doesn’t look up. He’s quietly annoyed with Kalen, quite honestly, now that he’s had time to think about it. He’s annoyed at him for disappearing most every day, for coming back late and for never telling him about being governor, and mostly for thinking whatever’s in this bag will make up for all of that.

“Oh.” Silence. “Why a duck?” Magnus stops carving then. He hasn’t thought about _why_. He just… a duck feels right. He hasn’t carved since Kalen found him, and some feeling in his hands directed him towards this duck. He tries to think harder about that feeling and his head hits static like a brick wall. So he shrugs and says, “I just like ducks.” Kalen looks at him for a moment, and then pulls a chair up to face him. He sits and says, “You’re gettin’ restless here.”

“Huh?” Magnus places the half carved duck and his knife down on the round table. Kalen pulls it toward himself and examines it. “Magnus, seein’ you fix that window, an’ my chair, an’ making a bed frame for yourself and now this, you know… I know how talented you are. And you shouldn’t be stayin’ with some nobody like me all day, every day.”

“You’re not a nobody,” Magnus points out. “You’re the governor.” Kalen leans back, eyes wide. He stares blankly, and Magnus stares back to assure him that he’s not backing down. And then Kalen laughs. “How’d you find out?” he asks, as if it were that simple all along.

“I talked to someone today,” Magnus answers. “She told me.” Kalen snorts. “She?” he ribs, leaning forward to bump Magnus in the chest with a limp hand. “You make yourself a lady friend?”

“No,” Magnus says, but his voice wobbles and he’s clearly embarrassed by the question. Magnus shoves his hand away, and Kalen puts both of them up in mock surrender. “Alright, alright! I won’t ask no more questions. Open up that bag there, Magnus.”

“What is it?” Magnus asks even as he pulls the bag to him. Kalen just moves his hand excitedly. “C’mon, open’er up.” Magnus does so, reaches into the bag without looking and removes a red shirt, a blue shirt, and several pairs of brown pants. Kalen wiggles his eyebrows at him. “You didn’t have no nice clothes,” he says. “An’ I figured, since I’m gonna introduce you to Steven-”

“You said that a month ago,” Magnus interrupts. Kalen’s eyes narrow. “I _said_ , since I’m gonna introduce you to Steven soon, you needed some nice clothes.” Magnus wants to argue. Wants to stay annoyed with Kalen. But he has nowhere else to go, so he bites his tongue and says, “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, Magnus.” He bustles across the kitchen and fills his kettle up. “Want any tea?”

“No thank you,” Magnus answers. He stands, picking up his carving. “Why didn’t you tell me you were governor?” Kalen shrugs. “Didn’t think to mention it. Didn’t wanna scare you off.”

“And you didn’t think lying to and isolating me for a month would be an issue?” Magnus asks, playing it off as cool and casual as he can. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the red bond between them pull taut, smaller fraying bits poking off the edges.

“Hold it there, Magnus, I didn’t isolate you. You chose to stay here because-”

“Because you never introduced me to anyone? Because Julia found me unconscious on the outskirts of town and brought me here and I never had any choice?” Magnus realizes that perhaps the outburst is unwarranted. But in his defense, he hasn’t had a chance to be angry yet. He hasn’t found purchase to express how _tired_ he is, and how much these holes in his memory are making him ache. How much he wants them back. And damn it, he was supposed to be able to _trust_ Kalen. 

And then Kalen’s face falls. Magnus feels his anger fall away with it. 

“Is that really how you feel, Magnus?” he asks. “Cuz you don’t gotta stay here if you don’t wanna. I got a house off the Sword Coast-”

“Kalen-”

“-don’t use it that much. Hell, haven’t been there in a couple years. I can even send some guards to accompany you.”

“Kalen, I don’t _need_ guards. I don’t need to leave.” Magnus sits back down at the table. “And I’m sorry.” Kalen shrugs a little. “You don’t gotta be sorry, Magnus. It must’a been driving you crazy, being cooped up here.” He reaches across the table and takes Magnus's duck back into his hands. “You belong workin’ on stuff like this.” He pats the duck on the head with one finger. “Not fixin’ my window.” He smiles, almost pained. “I’ll talk to Steven tomorrow,” he says, and his tone of voice is that of a promise. He slides the duck back to Magnus. “Keep on carvin’ this little guy. And tell me some more about this girl.”

The two of them spend the night at the table, chatting about Magnus's second encounter with Julia, carefully avoiding her name throughout it. Kalen seems to figure him out anyway, smiling a knowing smiling as he begins to tell Magnus about his work as the governor of Raven’s Roost. In the night sky outside, a vulture circles overhead.

-

Kalen leads Magnus back over the rickety bridge from the residential corridor. As they go, Magnus takes in the town he now calls home. Mistletoe flowers bloom proudly in the treetops alongside the pear blossoms and fruit hanging on lower branches. Kalen plucks a couple and hands one to Magnus. “Sweetest at late summer,” Kalen tells him. “Take a big ol’ bite.” Magnus does as he requested, rubbing the pear off on his shirt. He takes a bite and sticky juices flow down his chin.

“You nervous?” Kalen asks, and Magnus shakes his head exactly like he promised himself he wouldn’t. He’s not technically lying, he reasons to himself, because to call him nervous is the century’s biggest understatement. He’s sweaty, flustered, his stomach upset and protesting at even the bite of pear he had. Kalen nudges him with an elbow, takes a bite out of his own pear. “C’mon, don’t be like that.” He chews loudly through his words. “It’s alright to be nervous, you know. Steven’s prolly got the biggest business in town. He don’t hire just any ol’ guy.”

“Reassuring,” Magnus says, rolling his eyes as he chokes down another bite. Kalen shrugs. “Maybe second biggest,” he corrects himself somewhat lazily. “Second to the Patillos who run the market.” He bumps Magnus again. “Y’know, I got you somethin’ to help with your nerves.”

“Oh?” Magnus asks, disinterested. Right now, his mind is busy taking in the town and the people all around him. The bonds between them seem endless, spanning between everyone and everyone. The vision, and Raven’s Roost itself, is dizzyingly beautiful.

“Mhm.” Kalen reaches into his pocket and pulls out a rumpled sheet of paper. It sticks to his fingers with the pear juice on them, and he shakes it off. “Here y’are. Wrote it out last night.” Magnus unfurls the paper and finds loopy, scrawling handwriting covering it. Ink smudges dot the page, what looks like a spill dying the bottom edge a deep blue-black. Magnus reads down the list.

_Twin_  
Fire  
Glasses  
Protector  
Journal  
Peace  
Captain 

Magnus looks up from the list, reasonably confused. Kalen smiles at him. “It’s, y’know. For that word game we played.” He shrugs and takes another bite of his pear. “Thought it might soothe your brain. Distract you or something.” Magnus looks down at the list. So many words come flooding to mind, but none of them make sense to him: he thinks summers, thinks days and years and months of smiles and love, but none of that adds up. They’re just _words_. Even so, he smiles right back at Kalen. He’s not going to use this or play this game again, he’s sure of it. All this game does is make his head dizzy and foggy. But Kalen looks so hopeful, so pleased with himself and Magnus really can’t deny that. He wraps an arm around Kalen’s shoulders and jostles him back and forth. “Thanks,” he says, meaning it wholeheartedly. And that’s all he has time to say because suddenly they’re crossing another bridge and Magnus finds himself in the Craftsman’s Corridor.

It’s very typical Raven’s Roost architecture, really. Most of these buildings are made out of wood, a few stone, one odd one a metal dome from which smoke is pouring. Kalen sees him looking and identifies it as the blacksmith’s shop. Beyond that, this part of town is rather busy. Magnus has never gone this far into Raven’s Roost and now he can see that this is the opposite end of town to the one he came in on. A bridge fairly far down the busy street leads back onto dry, flat ground and that sight seems to just carry on forever, or at least until it disappears off into the horizon. Carriages dot the street, people on horseback or with mules and donkeys loaded up with furniture and pots and pans. But more than that, Magnus sees people who look like him: people with scarred skin and rough hands, sunburn on their shoulders, people with strong arms and thick legs and middles. Magnus feels his gut drop. He feels like… like this is where he was supposed to be all along.

Kalen must see something in his eyes, because he’s laughing at him. He reaches up and bumps Magnus with the back of his hand. “I knew you’d fit right in,” he says, and all Magnus can say in reply is an awestruck, “Thank you.”

Magnus nearly wanders by the Hammer and Tongs, too distracted by the brand new world around him. It’s an unsuspecting little building, not much in the windows or on the sign. Straight up and down letters spell out the shop’s name, and underneath pronounces it owned by the Waxman's, a name strangely familiar in Magnus's head. He can’t quite place it even so. Above the shop sits what appears to be a house.

“This is you,” Kalen says. “An’ I talked you up real good to Steven, so don’t make me look bad. My reputation matters here, of course.” 

“I- Yeah. Your reputation.” Magnus shakes his head, trying to snap out of his wonderment. He smiles uneasily at his friend. “I’ll make you proud, Kalen.”

“I don’t doubt ya for a minute, Burnsides.” Kalen beams, flicks up the brim of his hat. “See y’at home.” He leans forward and knocks on the door twice. “Steee-ven!” he hollers out, and when Magnus gives him a very sharp glance, Kalen just smiles brighter. With that, he turns and heads back for their house on the other side of Raven’s Roost.

It is a long moment before the door creaks open, and it takes Magnus a moment before he sees the person who opened it. He’s a slight man, standing crooked and leaned on a cane on his left side. He has sharp grey eyes and a hooked nose, a grizzled greying beard covering his jaw. He stands about four inches shorter than Magnus, but even so Magnus feels incredibly intimidated. A greenish colored light attaches them hip to hip, glowing dully in the midday sun. The man is looking up at him now, and his eyes scan up, down, then back up to meet Magnus's eyes. He purses his lips and whistles. “Kalen sure knows how to pick ‘em,” he says, and it all clicks in a rush. Magnus hurriedly offers his hand. “Magnus Burnsides,” he says, shaking Steven’s hand up and down with anxious vigor. “It- it’s an honor, Mr. Waxman sir, I-”

“Magnus,” he interrupts in his gruff voice, and he gives a decisive nod. It’s almost as if he’s approving of Magnus's name, and really, it feels nice to be approved of. He cracks a light smile up toward Magnus, and it’s crooked and kind in just the right way. “It’s nice to meet you. Kalen’s told me a lot about you.”

“He’s told me a lot about you, too, sir.” Steven nods again, turns and starts to limp back into the shop. “Well,” he says over his shoulder, “Kalen’s a trustworthy man. I’m sure whatever he told you, good or bad, was true.” Magnus follow him in, the overhead bell’s cheery ringing a stark contrast to his anxiously sweating palms and upset stomach. Steven looks him over again and states plainly, “You look strong.”

“I, uh. I am strong, sir.” Magnus feels strange trying to talk himself up. He’s not modest, really, at least not in general, but right now he feels smaller than he’s ever felt. Steven’s gaze just seems to do that. He waves a hand dismissively. “You can cut it with the ‘sir’s. Just call me Steven, Magnus, we’re both adults here. Come out back with me, if you don’t mind.”

“Yes, si- Steven.” The name feels unfamiliar in Magnus's mouth, but he’s certainly not going to argue. He follows Steven right through the workshop and out the back door.

Behind the shop lays massive logs, some cut into slightly smaller rounds by the axes laying haphazardly in the yellow grass. Steven gestures vaguely toward the ground. “This is you.”

Magnus stares down at the ground where Steven is pointing. Nothing is there save for a few chips of wood and a patch of browning grass. He looks back up, eyebrows knitted together. “Hm?” He asks, and Steven laughs slightly. “This is where you’ll be working, Magnus.”

“Oh.” Magnus kicks at the clump of grass. “It is?”

“Don’t sound so down on it. I can’t just be hirin’ any ol’ yahoo who says they can carve.” He limps forward and slaps Magnus on the back. “You’ll be workin’ with my kid. That is, if you’re still interested.” He gives Magnus a pointed stare, and Magnus knows better than to hesitate before he replies, “I’m interested, sir!”, and then amends that to, “Steven.” Steven’s stern face breaks into a bright smile again. “I like ya, Magnus,” he says, and he starts limping back toward the door. “Come on back, now,” he says. “Lemme tell you ‘bout the job a little bit.”

Magnus follows him back inside, staring out at the backyard that became his workplace just moments ago. The breeze whips stronger than usual overhead, and carries with it the scent of maple and oaks. As he heads in and closes the door behind him, the paper Kalen gave him falls from his pocket. Magnus doesn’t notice as those words, and whatever they might have once meant to him, escape him on the wind.

-

Kalen is waiting somewhat impatiently at the kitchen table when Magnus returns to what he may now call his home. Kalen starts a bit as he walks through the door, and then breaks into that toothy grin that Magnus has come to know. Kalen is faced away, foot tapping, a bowl of pears sitting before him. He must’ve picked them on his way back. Magnus takes a step into the kitchen. “Kalen?” Is all he has to say before Kalen is whirling around, up and out of his chair and tossing both arms around Magnus's shoulders. “Congratulations, Magnus!” He says, and he’s patting Magnus's back furiously. Magnus stands still, confused, but wraps his arms around Kalen anyway. “How’d you know I got the job?”

“How could you not?” Kalen laughs, pulling back with a laugh. He smiles, almost to himself. “Well, there’s that, and. Me an’ Steven’s little deal.” Magnus takes a step back to allow himself to look at Kalen properly. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” Kalen says simply, that little smile still tugging at all his features, “you know how I’m governor. Well, the way I sees it, that makes me partial owner of all the shops. I fund ‘em all, anyhow.” He shrugs, tossing his chin up toward his shoulder. “I said I’d fund him just a little bit more if he slid you the job. Not that he needed that money, really, but it was a nice little offer if I say so myself.” He turns his smile back to Magnus. “Glad to see it worked.” Magnus stands still in front of Kalen, wordless. He opens his mouth a few times to speak, but finds nothing to say and eventually just snaps his jaw shut. He shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have done that, Kalen.” Kalen, still smiling, scoffs. “What d’ya mean, Magnus? I landed you a job doing exactly what you should be doing. Aren’t you happy?” He puts his hand on Magnus's shoulder, and Magnus shakes it off violently. “Well, no,” Magnus answers. “Not really. I wanted the job off of merit, not blackmail.”

Kalen’s expression darkens. “It wasn’t blackmail. It was me doin’ you a favor, and to be honest with you I expected some gratitude.”

“For that?” Magnus says, gritting his teeth through the immense discomfort that arguing with Kalen is causing. “For getting me a job by cheating?”

“ _Cheating_?” Kalen laughs back. “It ain’t cheating, Magnus. That’s just how my job works.”

“That’s not how it should work, then.” He crosses his arms and stands up straight. He has several inches on Kalen. He could take him if he needed to.

“What do you know?” Kalen fires back. “You couldn’t even remember your damn name when I took you in. Hell, for all we know, it _ain’t_ your name. You could be some criminal, and then _my_ name’s on the line for getting you that job. You’d better be real damn thankful, Magnus.” There is venom laced in all his words.

“This isn’t about your name, Kalen, it’s about _mine_ ,” Magnus spits back. “I want Steven to want me working there. Not to be bullied into it.” Kalen shakes his head. “But he don’t want you there, Magnus.” He sounds sincere, wholly convinced that this is the truth. “He just doesn’t. I promise it. The only reason he took you was me.” He crosses his arms back. “You’re _welcome._ ”

“Then take the money back,” Magnus says with finality. “Take back the fucking money and I’ll find another job.” Kalen stares daggers up at him for a moment, seething, and then his anger breaks like a wave. His arms uncross. “Fine,” he says. He shakes his head. “Fine, I’ll take back the money. But that’s a real shame, Magnus, because I would’a liked to see you working there.”

“Yeah,” Magnus says. “A real _fucking_ shame.” He does not uncross his arms. The red bond between has grown tight again, hanging stubbornly in the air between them. Magnus watches pulses of light flow through it delicately, blissfully unaware of its own implications.

Kalen takes an uneasy step forward. He kicks at the ground bashfully. “I ain’t mad at you, Magnus. I just think we don’t understand each other as good as we thought we did.”

“I don’t think I understand you at all, Kalen,” Magnus admits. He keeps his distance. Kalen looks up at him like he’s seeking out some sort of softness or give, but Magnus makes sure that he doesn’t find it. After a moment spent searching, Kalen steps away again.

“I got some errands to run,” he says. “Gotta go handle some things downtown. Gotta talk to Steven now, too, I suppose. You’ll be fine here?”

“I’ll be fine here,” Magnus echoes. He scarcely looks down at Kalen. His insides are wound up tight, too, fit to snap and burst with just one wrong move. Kalen stands still before him for a long while before he exits, leaving the screen door swinging behind him. Magnus sits in silence for a long time.

Magnus cannot, for the life of him, comprehend why Kalen would want to pay his way into a job, any job, even one not for himself. Magnus has always found it easier to just do the work and earn things. Maybe there was a time when he was younger that he would have accepted the deal, but if there was the memory is gone now. He wouldn’t have even considered buying his way into the Hammer and Tongs. He knows he’s good enough on his own.

Bright lights dart around the room, connecting dust mites to feathers that blow in through the still open door. Magnus watches them, and then he gets up and takes it upon himself to move his bed into the Kalen’s office, away from Kalen’s own bed. When Kalen comes home late that night, Magnus is not awake to greet him.

The next morning, Magnus finds a shiny new axe laid out on the kitchen table. Kalen watches over his coffee cup as Magnus picks it up, eyes it closely, and then leaves the room again without thanking him.

-

Magnus keeps his job at the Hammer and Tongs, much to Kalen’s chagrin. When Magnus goes off to work that first day, Kalen sips his coffee angrily in his direction. His eyes say anger, but his body say dejection; Kalen’s head hangs in a way that tells Magnus that he was right all along. That Magnus never needed his shitty bribe to land a nice job. Even so, Kalen’s made bread, and it sits temptingly in the center of the table. The smell is nice, and Magnus is hungry, so he takes a roll. Kalen scoffs and takes his coffee into the other room. Magnus watches after him, but by the time the door has shut he’s decided to simply brush it off. He slams his own coffee down in one gulp, leaving it black and bitter, and he heads out.

The walk through Raven’s Roost is pleasant, as always. Children run after hoops through the streets, a goat bleats in a faroff pen and a swallow swoops overhead. The smells of spring are sweet and sticky in the air, fragrant with flowers and half-wet dirt drying fast in the overhead sun. Magnus takes it all in, the bonds between flora and fauna, between a child and the pet pig she has tied up on a rope across the street. He crosses the street and gives the pig part of his bread along with a thorough head-patting. The little girl smiles at him, and Magnus watches a soft green light form between them as he smiles back.

The street outside the Hammer and Tongs is busier than it was last time. It’s occupied by a massive cart lead by three horses, and a large man with a mustache is pulling log after log off the cart. Steven is standing outside, too, and when he sees Magnus, his face brightens. He beckons him over enthusiastically.

“Burnsides!” he barks, and Magnus stands at attention. Some fog-addled part of his brain tells him he’s had his name called like that before, not too long ago. Steven looks surprised, and then smiles even wider. “C’mere, Magnus.” His beckoning grows more frantic. “Quickly, now. Daylight don’t last forever.” Magnus unfreezes at the call of his first name and picks up the pace toward Steven. Steven leans on his cane and waits as Magnus approaches and then gestures toward the cart with his free hand. “We’re bringin’ all this here wood around back. Mind helpin’ out?”

“Not at all,” Magnus says confidently, not sparing a moment to consider what Steven might mean when he says we. Magnus is already walking toward the cart. He flashes a showy smile at the cart driver as he hauls a log over his shoulder with what might look like ease to an outsider and starts toward the backyard.

He dumps the log off out of his grasp and into the yellowing grass. As he does, he hears a nearby grunt that signifies great effort. He looks up and sees the ties-up hair and bared, sweaty neck of a woman, tied back to him with a familiar blue light that immediately makes his gut drop. Magnus stumbles backward, hits a log and loses his footing, falling with a yelp. He wraps his hands over his eyes, rapidly approaching humiliation, and waits.

Magnus hears a laugh. Not a cruel laugh, but a bold one, one uninhibited by any care for what someone might think of it, one that is genuine and gentle at the same time it is harsh and throat-scratching. Magnus peels open his eyes and looks up at a familiar sight.

“Well, well, well.” Magnus squints through the sunlight and finds a smile on that desperately beautiful face. “Looks like history repeats itself, don’t it, mister Magnus?”

Magnus opens his mouth to respond but is suddenly and violently choked as hands wrap around his lapels. Magnus is pulled upward, back onto his feet and into the wide shadow of Julia, still smiling. She tilts her head. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Magnus tries for his own smile but feels it curl awkwardly at the ends, feels his cheeks hot and dark. She keeps holding onto him as she says, “How come I keep finding you on your back in the dirt, mister Magnus? This a hobby of yours?”

“Uh,” Magnus responds dumbly. He rubs at his aching neck. “Steven hired me.”

Julia whistles, but it seems to be difficult with that smile still pressing across her face. “I see. Well, papa did tell me he hired some new muscle.”

Magnus blinks. He tilts his head. “Steven’s your dad?” 

Julia snorts. “Well, duh. He didn’t just pull me off the street.” She eyes Magnus carefully. “Unlike some other handsome workers around here.”

Magnus works his mouth open and shut wordlessly, eyes wide at Julia. His heart pounds so hard that he’s sure she can feel it through her grip on him. She called him _handsome._ And just like that, laughter washes over him like a wave. He tosses his head back, eyes shut and mouth open wide. He feels sun hit his face as Julia leans back, likely with surprise. Her hands stay locked around his collar.

When he stops, Julia has an eyebrow raised. She bumps him in the chest with her knuckles. “Not sure what you’re laughin’ at. But you got a pretty smile, mister Magnus.” Her eyes narrow a bit, and she looks down at his lips and then bites slightly at her own and leans in a little and she’s about to say something-

“Julia!” comes a thunderous cry from the frontside of the building. “You ain’t been out here in too long! You slackin’?”

“Nooo, papa,” she calls back, and her hands finally evacuate Magnus's collar. He rubs at the lines it has pressed into his skin.

“Is Magnus back there with you?” booms Steven’s voice again, now slightly accusatory. “Are you teasin’ the new boy?”

“No, papa,” she answers again. This time, she’s staring Magnus down, shoulders squared as if she’s challenging him to oppose her. Magnus feels his own shoulders hunch up toward his ears, another goofy smile splitting his face. Julia sees this and must be satisfied with the response because her stance softens and she tosses her hair back over her shoulders. Magnus can see the muscles grouped beneath her skin, massive, fit to rival his own. He finds himself staring and pries his eyes away, turning them to the ground. Julia laughs softly.

“I wanna see you both out here in no more than two minutes!” Steven alerts them, and Magnus startles back up to full height. He calls out, “Yes, Steven!”, and immediately starts for the front again.

“Hey Magnus,” comes Julia’s voice. It’s softer now, her accent carrying her words like a gentle breeze on the sea. Magnus turns back to face her, and he wonders how he knows what the sea feels like. He can’t puzzle it together - he’s never seen the sea after all - but what he does know is that Julia crashes into him like a wave when she comes around. He keeps smiling. She keeps smiling back.

“I’m looking forward to workin’ with you,” is all she says, her head tilted slightly and that small smile still playing across her lips. Something unsaid lingers in the air. Magnus longs for it, longs for anything more, but what he wants falls quickly to the wayside as they start back around the building together and Magnus is gifted instead with what he needs.

-

Magnus flourishes at his job. To have a purpose again revitalizes him; he feels better than he has in the whole time since he showed up in Raven’s Roost. He and Kalen have started back toward a shaky friendship, too, with Kalen cooking at night so that Magnus has something to bring to work the next day and Magnus replacing all of his cabinet doors with new, better fitted ones. They don’t talk as much, but that’s alright. Conversations with Kalen always felt a bit like a chore. And so Magnus talks to Julia instead. 

It starts with small talk, but grows quickly beyond that. The two of them click in a way Magnus has never experienced before, like a key into a lock or a hand into another. They shout back and forth to each other over the racket of their axes swinging, laughing and joking and growing indescribably close. When Magnus has dreams filled with static that tear his brain and heart up, he tells Julia about them. When Julia disagrees with her father, she tells Magnus about it. When they take their breaks, they sit near each other in the shade and watch hummingbirds flutter by, drinking lemonade made just upstairs in the Waxman house and speculating about when the rain will start. Spring has long since set in, and the yellowed grass in the workyard has turned vibrant green and sprouted flowers which Julia weaves into her curls. Magnus's heart swells, grows larger day by day to make room for the love he has for her, his very best friend. If he can be thankful for nothing else about the lost time in his memory and his unsure past, he can at least be thankful that it led him to her.

They talk about Kalen sometimes, when Magnus first begins working with her. But less and less is he brought up as they create their own memories together.

Magnus works five days a week from sunrise to sunset, but sometimes even that isn’t enough for him. He’s paid plenty well, fifty gold pieces a day, and when he shows up on days when he’s not supposed to work Steven still lets him and pays him all the same. Magnus would generally rather be there than at home with Kalen. He likes his job, of course, and does it gladly, but beyond that, Julia is always there and ready for him, her face split with a wide smile and bright eyes gleaming at him from under thick lashes. He treasures that look, one he’s only ever seen directed toward himself, and so he tries to see it as often as he can, rushing in and across the backyard to pull her into a long hug.

Magnus still stays home sometimes. Usually, it’s on days where static pings around his head like a bouncing ball, crashing into walls and making more noise than any one person should ever be subjected to. On those days, he tries to remember things. He finds slivers, cool water slipping between his fingers, a feeling that he’s lost someone that he’ll never replace. On those days, he stays in bed. He and Kalen converse quietly or not at all. Magnus doesn’t mind either way.

On one of those rare days when he remains in bed, there is a knock on the door. Kalen’s round, pale face pokes into the office which he’d abandoned when Magnus started sleeping there. “Someone’s here to see you,” Kalen says. His voice is soft, and Magnus thanks him silently for that. Small kindnesses are all he asks of Kalen anymore.

“Tell them to go away,” Magnus responds. Today is especially bad, and static fills his ears even as he’s speaking. Kalen looks nervously back in the direction of the front door. “I can do that for you, Magnus, but I dunno if your boss would really like it.”

“My boss?” Magnus is already on his feet, stripping down and putting on new, clean clothes. Kalen shields his eyes half-heartedly; really, he’s used to seeing Magnus strip. “Yeah, Steven,” Kalen affirms. “Says he’s got a real important job and it can’t wait.”

“I guess I’ll see you later then,” Magnus says, buttoning up his shirt with one hand while the other tries and fails to pull on a shoe. Kalen watches his flailing for a moment with a raised brow before he starts out of the room without so much as a goodbye. Magnus hardly notices he’s gone.

He’s out the door in a matter of minutes, almost bumping into Steven as he rushes out. Steven sticks out his hands to stop him. “Woah, there,” he says with a grin, leaning back over on his cane. Magnus stands up straight in front of him. “Sorry, Steven!” he says, much too loud for their close proximity, trying to hear himself over the static, and Steven gestures for him to take a step back. Magnus obediently does. He’s not generally so subservient, but he wants so badly to impress Steven that he’d do anything, including power through the powerful fog flooding his brain with emptiness.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come in today,” Magnus is already saying, wringing his hands together nervously. “I had no idea about this project, I had… I’ve got a pretty gnarly headache and I want to be my best at work, of course.” He doesn’t have a headache, but the only person he’s told about the static dreams and phantom pains is Julia. Julia’s not here, so he lies. Steven nods sympathetically, but is smiling like he knows a secret that Magnus doesn’t.

“Come take a walk with me, Magnus,” he says easily, and gestures out toward the road. Magnus follows him, still straightening out his shirt.

They walk in calm silence, the sounds of birds and life in Raven’s Roost settling in the air around them. In Magnus’s ears, static flows freely, as well, digging into his brain with an unsure ache. Magnus is already sure that they’re going to the Hammer and Tongs, but he doesn’t say anything for fear of being wrong or presumptuous. It still is no surprise when they stop out front and wait as Steven unlocks the building. It seems almost as if they’ve closed for the day, which is strange. It’s only just past noon and Magnus has never seen the shop actually closed before. It’s dark inside when Steven beckons him in, lighting the lanterns around the shop that toss them into golden flickering light. Steven gestures for him to sit on the floor in front of a shape that is not usually there, covered in a thick brown cloth. Suspicious but unwilling to argue, Magnus does as he’s been asked.

Steven pulls up a chair beside him, and to Magnus's quizzical glance he points to his bad leg. “I can’t get down on the floor,” he explains. “I’d never get up.”

“I could lift you,” Magnus offers without much thought, and fortunately that pulls a laugh out of Steven. “You’re a real good kid, Magnus. How long you been working here?”

“Two months,” Magnus answers quickly. He knows this for sure, because it’s been exactly that long since he ate dinner with Kalen last. Steven makes a little humming noise. “Two months,” he repeats. “Well, Magnus, you know I only hired you on as muscle. That should come as no surprise.”

“I- Yes, I know that.” Magnus feels his heart sinking. He’s known he was brought on for a multitude of reasons that are less than satisfactory to him, but he’s tried to bury that with good memories of chopping wood with Julia and sharing drinks with Julia and… well, mostly just with Julia. At the very least, Steven doesn’t seem to notice his discomfort as he looks behind himself to the window where the show chairs are stationed. They’re very nice, carved with an expert hand and wood of fine quality. Magnus feels himself pulled to them constantly with a sort of urgency that he cannot explain, but he’s always resisted the urge and just looked without touching. Steven stands and walks to them. He puts his hand on the arm of a black oak rocking chair and says, “Tell me about this chair, Magnus.”

Magnus hesitates. He says, “I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t make it.” Steven raises an eyebrow. “Well, have you made a chair before?”

“Yes. Lots for Kalen.”

“Then you should be able to tell me something. Come here.”

Magnus approaches almost shyly and reaches his hand out. The finish is fine and dark, luscious almost, perfectly smooth where it should be smooth and rough where it should be rough. The grain of the wood itself is beautiful, a flowing diagonal pattern of half circles that carries across every piece of wood in the chair. The wood is softened at the edges, rounded corners, perfect for relaxing or rocking a child to sleep. Magnus looks up at Steven, awed by his craftsmanship. Steven is already looking back, a knowing look in his eyes.

“This chair is beautiful,” Magnus says. Steven nods. “I think that’s all you need to say. Your eyes say the rest, Magnus.” He moves back to his own seat and takes it. Magnus stays by the chair, lightly running his fingers over the seat and the back, over the curved bands that make up the rockers on the bottom. Steven clears his throat. “Now for that project Kalen told you about.”

Magnus snaps out of it and walks dutifully back over, taking his place on the floor. Steven reaches for the edge of the cloth and smiles at him. “You think you’re ready?”

Magnus has never been one to hesitate. He smiles broadly. “Absolutely.”

Steven pulls off the cloth and underneath is just a pile of boards and planks, screws and a little plastic container of wood glue. Steven gestures toward it, and Magnus thinks he understands immediately. He gives a slight head shake. “I won’t have enough time before the sun goes down.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Steven says. He takes a plank of wood into his hands. “I’m helping you.”

Magnus doesn’t question Steven any more than that. He takes a plank of wood into his own hand and carefully picks a saw off the wall. If Magnus didn’t know better, he might’ve thought that the smile Steven gives him is proud.

They work much together like they walked together: silently, but in near perfect step. Magnus barely even comes close to cutting off Steven’s fingers a couple times, and they work quickly. Outside, the sun moves toward the horizon in a steady arc. Upstairs, Magnus can hear a tea kettle whistling.

“Is Julia home?” he asks absently, sawing off a couple carefully measured inches of wood. Steven chuckles. “You sure have taken a shine to my daughter, Burnsides.” His voice is just cold enough to startle Magnus, who stutters uncomfortably for a moment. “I- Well, yes, I mean, she’s a great girl.” He clears his throat, looking back to the board. He definitely cut off a little too much while distracted.

“I don’t take issue with it, Magnus,” Steven laughs. “She seems real happy around you. Just treat her right, okay?”

“I, uh. We’re just friends.” Magnus picks up a new board to replace the one he screwed up. Steven shakes his head, still cutting and gluing steadily. “Julia’s had plenty of people who were just friends, Magnus. I know what that means.” He’s still smiling, which is good. Magnus was terrified for the moment that Steven seemed cold toward him, but his usual sentiments have returned. Magnus goes back to his work quietly, and stops asking about Julia as a new rule for himself.

They are quiet for another long while. Steven stands from his chair somewhere along the line, stretching his legs and walking around in a couple small circles without his cane, limping along the way. Magnus looks up and watches. “Steven,” he says eventually, and Steven meets his eye, responding with a raised eyebrow. Magnus clears his throat. “I don’t mean to be insensitive, sir, but what happened to give you your limp?” Steven’s other eyebrow raises. “Well,” he says, with a slight nod upward, “that’s a very good question, Magnus. I’d tell you if I could.”

“Wha-” Magnus shakes his head. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Me neither,” Steven admits, taking his seat again. “I know I hurt it in a war. That’s all I can remember.” He reclines slightly. “Can’t even remember if I was on the good side or bad side. All I remember is…” He grimaces. “Well, you’re gonna think I’m nuts if I say this, but...”

Magnus's blood has turned to ice. He can almost mouth along with the answer as Steven says, “Everything I remember, Magnus, is just static.”

Magnus starts nodding, slowly at first and then desperately, furiously, his eyes wide. Steven tilts his head. “Magnus, what’re you noddin’ for?”

“Me _too,_ ” he says, head still nodding of its own accord. They’ve both stopped working on the chair, now half finished.

“You… I’m sorry, Magnus, are you sayin’ you were in a war too?”

“No, but I- the _static,_ Steven, I hear it, too.” He swallows against his painfully tight throat. “And it feels cold and almost painful and it only happens when you try to think about certain things. But you don’t know what those things are because you can’t think them.”

Steven’s eyebrows furrow. He touches Magnus lightly on the back. “That’s right,” he says softly. “I… I’m sorry. I ain’t never met nobody else who’s felt it.” His hand brushes across his shoulders, and then the comforting touch is gone. He straightens out his back. “But the way I look at it, if those memories are gone, that’s alright by me. I don’t need to remember screwin’ my leg up.” He shakes it weakly. “It happened. It’s like that now. And if I get to forget some pain, all the better.” He shrugs and gives a smile before turning back to his work. He’s fastening the third leg onto the chair.

Magnus joins him in his work, but is distracted. He wonders if Steven saw the bond between them just now swelling with light and growing into something bigger upon their revelation. But more, he wonders if the static leaves Steven’s chest aching like he lost a friend, too.

They finish the chair long after the sun sets, their only light coming from the lanterns around the room. At some point, Julia comes downstairs and tells her father that she made him dinner, and he tells her he’ll be up soon. It is hours later that Magnus is brushing on the finish, the scent of it dark and rich, hanging heavy in the air. Steven whistles low. “That’s a fine chair, Magnus.” He gestures toward the top. “Beautiful woodwork up here. The top rail and the spindle, especially.” Magnus, still kneeling on the floor, grins up at him. “Thank you, Steven,” he smiles. “But it’s, uh. It’s nowhere near as good as yours.”

Steven laughs. “My chair?” he asks, almost incredulously. Magnus tilts his head in confusion. “Well, yeah. Yours in the window.”

“Magnus, that’s Julia’s chair,” he chuckles. “I don’t display my own. Those all are made to order.” He looks over the chair that he and Magnus made. “And I think this one would rival any I’ve made.” He smiles and sticks his hand out. Magnus takes it, still looking at the rocking chair in the window that he so greatly admired. _Julia’s_ chair. He’s a bit awestruck. She’s even more talented than he thought.

“Magnus, look at me.” He does, just managing to turn his head away. Steven has that vaguely proud look on his face again. “I think you’ll make a great addition to our team here, Magnus. I wanna hire you full time.”

Magnus feels a smile form on his lips. “Full-time?” he repeats.

“Yes, full-time. I’ll need you in the shop six or seven days a week, of course, and you’ll have to stay late…”

“That’ll be no problem!” Magnus is already saying, chest fluttering with excitement. Getting to carve and build for work is a dream, and now he’s been offered a chance to do so. Steven holds up a hand to halt him. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, now. What I’m offerin’ you is an apprenticeship, just learning how to hone your craft under me. You’re good, Magnus, but not as good as you could be. Do you understand?”

Magnus nods excitedly. “Yes, sir. Yes, Steven.”

“As my apprentice, you’ll need to spend some extra time with me. You got a place you could stay in town?”

“No. Just with Kalen.”

Steven makes a sort of _harumph_ noise deep in his throat, and puts a finger to his chin. He stares down at the floorboards while he thinks, and Magnus's heart hammers out a tune against his ribcage. He’s so happy he could cry, and probably would if he weren’t standing beside his boss. His _mentor_.

“Well,” Steven says eventually, sounding a bit resigned, “we’ve got an empty room up in the house. So what d’you say, Magnus? Feel like movin’ in?”

Magnus can hardly breathe he’s so excited. His dream job, living with his best friend and a man he respects greatly. Finally matching the emotional distance between he and Kalen with physical distance. All he can do is shake Steven’s hand again, a wild grin on his face.

“Alright, alright,” Steven laughs, pulling his hand away. “Just give me some time to clean up, I’ll give you some time to pack. We’ll be ready for you in about ten days. Just give us that long, a’right?” Magnus could be ready in a day. He has so little at Kalen’s, and even spending three months there hardly made it a home. He doesn’t say any of that, though, just nods and says, “I’ll be ready!”

“Now get home,” Steven instructs him, sternly, but with kindness laced into it expertly. “It’s late.”

Magnus thanks Steven several more times before he head out. This late, the streets are empty and silent, lights flickering in windows. Magnus doesn’t worry about any potential for attacks or unseen marauders. The only sounds tonight are his own footsteps, a raven’s mournful caw, and the faroff creak of a lonely cricket in the bushes.

-

The early morning comes in like a breath, easily and smoothly. Magnus wakes with the sun and with no static in his mind. It’s going to be one of the good days.

He can hear Kalen in the other room, stomping around and arguing with someone about something, but that’s nothing unusual. Kalen gets strange calls on his Stone of Farspeech at all hours of the night, and often enough it’s arguments. Magnus doesn’t listen closely, but listens enough to pick up pieces: a shop in town going under, something is Kalen’s fault, an owed sum of money. Magnus doesn’t care to decipher it today. He’s on top of the world.

When the argument dies down, he hears Kalen end the call with a sharp, “ _Thank_ you.” The pacing footsteps he’d heard slow to a calm pace, and he hears the clatter of a pan hitting the counter. Kalen is baking. He does that when he’s stressed.

Magnus spends a moment looking over his things. The things he thinks he’d actually care to bring with him are few and far between: his axes, both old one and the new one, a few carvings, the clothes Kalen bought him and the jacket he came with. It barely fills a bag when he tries it. He unpacks his things, setting them back on the floor around his bed. He starts off into the front room, a spring in his step that he hasn’t felt in a while.

Kalen bakes like a hurricane ripping through a city, slamming flour onto the counter with such force that the bag splits a bit, spilling sugar and water onto the counter in his tantrum. Magnus thinks vaguely that they’ll wind up with ants that way, but then remembers that he’ll be gone in ten days, anyway. That puts the pep right back in him as he waltzes over to the table. Kalen is tossing pans down out of the cabinet.

“The baking sheets are at the far left,” Magnus says nonchalantly, pouring himself a cup of coffee. Kalen whirls around on him, a sneer catching his lip. “What are _you_ so chipper about?” he snarls, and Magnus is not caught off guard at all. Kalen has been like this more and more recently. It is as if something in him has snapped, violently and suddenly, and now he’s a different person. Magnus wonders if it has to do with the phone calls, or with him.

“Steven hired me full time,” he says. He takes a drink of his coffee. It’s too bitter, but he didn’t dare try to navigate around Kalen to reach the sugar. And just like that, Kalen’s anger fizzles away like a small flame in water. His eyebrows leap up his face. “Full time?” he repeats, just like Magnus did. Magnus nods. “Yeah. He’s taking me on as his apprentice.”

“Well.” He turns back to his mess. “Congratulations are in order, I suppose. You’ll be spending more time with him?” Magnus nods wordlessly, his mouth filled with coffee. Kalen snorts. “Good luck getting into town that early every day. You’ll basically live at the Hammer and Tongs.”

Magnus stays silent. He looks closely at the shoddy wood grain in Kalen’s table. 

“Wait a minute, Magnus, don’t tell me that’s what you’re sayin’.” Kalen moves toward the table, a frown twisting his lips in an unpleasant manner. Magnus can only see him out of the corner of his eye, and he tilts his head down to keep it that way. But Kalen chases him down, presses his cheek down to the table almost comically and fights to catch his flighty gaze. Magnus avoids it expertly, and Kalen stands back up and scoffs. “Alright. I understand, Magnus. I understand just fine.” He walks back to the counter and drops a pan onto it with a deafening crash. “Too good now to even tell your ol’ friend Kalen what’s goin’ on. Well, that’s just _fine. By. Me._ ” He slams a cabinet door shut with each word, and the whole house seems to shake. Magnus watches the bond between them tighten and swell, and that doesn’t make sense. Kalen is fighting with him. Shouldn’t it split apart?

“Kalen,” he starts, and his mouth is dry. Kalen cuts him off anyway with a sneer that would silence anyone. “Well, fuck, Magnus, I just don’t get it. I take you in, I give you-” his voice wobbles- “ _everything_ and you just up and leave the second something else comes along. Well that don’t seem too _fair_ to me, Magnus Burnsides. Feels a little like you’re spittin’ in my face.” He leans over the counter and, horrifyingly, laughs. The sound is small and choked but it’s definitely a laugh, and Magnus's skin crawls with it. Kalen shakes his head. “What am I sayin’?” he chuckles. “It makes sense, don’t it, Magnus? You ain’t never been grateful for the things I gave you. I got you a job, put a roof over your head, bought you clothes when you looked a mess, and what’d you give me? A window that doesn’t squeak?”

“Kalen, I’m sorry, really” Magnus scoffs. “Really. But I think you’re taking this too far.”

“Too far?” Kalen chuckles. “Really, now? You don’t think we passed the point _too far_ when you rejected my job offer?”

“Your job offer was _cheating,_ Kalen. I don’t break any rules that don’t need broken.”

“Well maybe the whole damn system needs broken!” Kalen says, just a bit too loud, but that’s enough to make Magnus’s defenses go up. He clenches his fists. “Maybe the system’s already all sorts of busted up if it doesn’t allow a man to get a job for his friend!”

“You sound fucking loopy right now, Kalen,” Magnus warns. “You sound like you’re going to overthrow Raven’s Roost’s government or something.”

“Overthrow it?” Kalen laughs. “I _am_ the government here, Magnus. Not the town council or the judges or the police. It’s all me. And if I wanna get someone I _thought_ was my friend a goddamn job-”

“You _bribed_ Steven!” Magnus cuts in. “You didn’t get me a job, you _cheated._ You thought I wasn’t good enough on my own!” Magnus feels his throat tighten. He knows he’s good enough. He _knows_ that. The idea that he might not be still aches.

Kalen stands up straight, shoulders back. He shakes his head. “You ain’t good enough, Magnus,” he says, now eerily quiet. “But I don’t mind all that.” He walks across the kitchen on light feet, back to the bowl where he was mixing ingredients silently just minutes ago. Kalen goes back to mixing, and the room is still.

“You’re welcome back any time,” Kalen says eventually. He doesn’t turn to look at him. “You’ll always have a home here. Just know that.” But for now at least, Magnus is tired of playing games with Kalen. He pours the rest of his coffee down the sink, and goes to work for the day.

-

Kalen’s first bribes are innocent enough. Magnus comes home that evening to a neat pair of brown cargo shorts folded on the table. Kalen smiles at him. “In honor your new job,” he says. “Lotsa pockets. They’ll let you hold all the tools you need, mister crafty man.” Magnus is suspicious, but he thanks him. They do fit perfectly, after all.

The gifts keep coming from there. The next day, Magnus can’t find his red jacket that he came to Raven’s Roost with. Kalen waves a hand vaguely when asked. “I’m having it tailored for you,” he says. “Didn’t it seem a little too small?” Unfortunately, Magnus can’t disagree with that, and so he lets it go. Kalen smiles when he sees the resignment on his face. “I’ll have it back to you tomorrow,” he promises. The next day comes, and Magnus doesn’t get it back. Instead, he gets a set of knives. “For your new house,” Kalen says. “They match my knife set here. Maybe it’ll make you feel at _home_.” His voice is poison when he says this.

By the fourth day, Magnus knows Kalen is trying to make him stay. He’s got three gifts laid out on his bed when he comes home: a pair of boots, overalls, a block of incredibly nice, expensive wood. Magnus is endeared slightly, but mostly uncomfortable with the effort. He and Kalen don’t get along, that much is obvious, and so the attempts seem desperate and clumsy rather than genuine. To say the least, Magnus feels honored that his presence means so much to Kalen. To say more, he’d admit that he’s scared of what Kalen will do when he’s gone.

His worry evolves to panic on the fifth day when he doesn’t come home to a gift. Rather, the door to his room is ajar and a carving from his desk is missing. It’s a really nice duck, one he was especially proud of. He doesn’t worry much about it, but it does distract him all through dinner. Kalen makes roast beef and green beans, and smiles at Magnus almost menacingly over the table. Magnus tries to avoid eye contact.

He tells Julia about Kalen, and she rolls her eyes over the table they’re polishing together. “I’m sure he’s just moody,” she says. “He doesn’t have very many friends, Magnus. My bet is he’ll get over it in a week, tops.”

“That’s fair,” Magnus says. “But, I mean. He’s got you and Steven.” He wipes down the flat top of the table. Julia laughs, a snort caught in the middle. “Oh, yeah. Kalen and I are _real_ close,” she says, and Magnus definitely knows enough about Julia to tell that she’s not being genuine. He’s not sure that he’s ready to hear why, exactly, and so he doesn’t ask and Julia doesn’t tell him. They fall into an easier conversation about Julia’s dogs and how they’ve been as of late. Magnus hasn’t seen them recently, and so asking feels only natural.

When he comes home, the house is unusually dark. Magnus lights a lamp and finds the duck he’s been missing, sitting on the table. Its wing is broken off beside it along with a scribbly note.

_Magnus- broke this by accident. Hope you can fix it. Kalen._

Magnus moves to pick it up gently. He thinks he can reattach the wing with just a little wood glue. But as he lifts it, the duck shifts and with little consequence, the head slides off. Magnus watches in shock as it tumbles down to the table. The slice across the neck is clean. It wasn’t done by accident.

A knife is laying in the sink. Caught in its grooves are wood shavings.

“Hey there, Magnus.” Kalen’s voice is low and near to his ear. Magnus whirls around, dropping the knife with a clatter. Kalen is smiling. “No need to be so jumpy. I’m sorry about your duck, there.” He gestures toward the table. “I’m sure you’ll be able to make a bunch more with your new job, yeah?”

Magnus shakes his head. “Kalen, this is way too far.” Kalen’s face falls.

“I’m not sure what you mean.” He tilts his head slightly. “I haven’t done anything, have I?”

“Don’t play stupid.” Magnus steps forward, and feels his pride swell when Kalen steps back. “I know exactly what you’re doing.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me treating my friend,” Kalen says. He smiles uneasily at the word friend.

“You’re not my _friend,_ ” Magnus spits. “You’re… you’re _mad._ ” He laughs, shakes his head. “The mad governor Kalen. That’s you.”

“Maybe watch what you’re sayin’, Magnus.” He takes a step forward and tilts his chin up. “Cuz you’re about to make a real powerful enemy.”

“I’m not scared of you.” He raises a hand, fist clenched. Kalen doesn’t back away this time. “I refuse to be afraid of a liar.”

“I haven’t lied to you, Magnus,” Kalen says quietly. “I’m trying to help you.”

“You’re threatening me.”

“I’m _warning_ you. I only want the best for you, Magnus.” He holds his arms out as if for a hug. “Don’t you understand?”

“I don’t.” Magnus steps back to the sink and picks up the knife. “Why did you do this?”

Kalen smiles. “I don’t quite understand either, Magnus, to tell you the honest truth. But my gut’s been right often enough before to know that you’re just gonna get hurt.”

Magnus drops the knife. “Then let me get hurt, Kalen. But don’t fuck with my life.”

Kalen’s smile falls away. He goes to touch Magnus’s arm, but Magnus swats him away. The bond between them is massive, bright, casting bloody shadows around the room. Kalen pulls his hand back. “Fine,” he says. “Fine. Just come with me to the door, then. Let me show you something.” He disappears into the front room and Magnus, despite his better judgement, follows.

Kalen is holding the door open. He points Magnus to the outside. “Look here, Magnus,” he says. “It’s your last gift.”

Magnus steps outside. Kalen fills the doorway, lit from behind and made into nothing more than a shadow to him.

“Remember, you’re always welcome back.” He tilts his head like he does when he smiles. “Just give it time.” The door swings shut suddenly, hard, and Magnus hears the click of a lock. He pauses for a moment, stunned. He pulls on the doorknob. It doesn’t budge.

“Kalen,” he says, exasperated. There is no reply. “Kalen!” he tries again, much louder, and the sound echoes quietly back against the walls. Kalen doesn’t answer. Magnus walks around the house and tries the kitchen door, the window into his room, the window into the bathroom. All of them are locked. Magnus realizes two things in quick succession. All of his worldly possessions are still in there except for his grandfather’s knife in his pocket and the clothes on his back. That, and he is alone.

He looks up to the sky. A raven circles the north star like a planet in orbit. And he starts to wander.

The streets of Raven’s Roost are different this late at night. They are quiet and they are lonely, they seem longer and more baren. He can only see so far in the dark, but lights guide the way, stringing between houses and thatched roofs, between leaves and the ground. Nighttime is a light show to Magnus, and for once, he’s thankful. He walks along in their glow, ignoring the red light still wrapped around his fists. He wishes it would snap and fall away. He wishes he could untie it from himself. Magnus has never felt so cursed by his ability as he does now, when Kalen’s friendship is a mere memory and no longer something he can claim.

The red spans on endlessly, guiding him back to what could’ve been a home. He could follow it back, he thinks. He could go sleep on the porch and apologize to Kalen in the morning. But instead, he steels himself and follows the blue and green lights that he recognizes just as well. They both lead to the same place, and he finds himself outside of the Hammer and Tongs. It’s much too late for it to be open, so Magnus doesn’t even try the doorknob. He looks in the window instead. The chair Julia made sold a few days ago and stands in the window no longer. It’s been replaced with a coat rack, built out of cedar. It’s something he made just a day or two ago. Something Steven was proud of him for.

Magnus grows bored of looking at his own work, but he doesn’t know what else to do. He sits patiently on the doorstep and prays for sunrise.

He’s been relaxing against the door for a while, dozing off at intervals before snapping back awake, when something soft hits his head. He startles awake and into a sitting position, looking around rapidly for the source of the hit. He finds a tiny stuffed bunny lays on the ground beside him, just slightly dirty from where it made contact with the earth. He picks it up and brushes dirt off of its white fluff. It doesn’t make sense, and he can’t quite parse where it came from, but it feels like a good sign. A familiar soft blue light guides it to his chest, where he holds it gingerly. It’s only seconds later when a second, larger stuffed toy hits him in the head. This time, it is a bear, brown with short curly fur. Magnus catches this one as it bounces off his shoulder and holds in in his other hand. He stares down the two of them, and their round button eyes stare back. He lifts them closer to his face. “Now, where did you two come from?” he wonders aloud, and hears a gentle laugh from above that makes his heart flutter. When he looks up, Julia is hanging out her window, one hand on her chin. She cocks her head to the right. “It’s supposed to rain tonight, you know,” she says, her voice just barely loud enough to be heard. It is obvious she’s trying to avoid waking Steven.

Magnus shakes his head. “I didn’t know that.” He looks down to examine his clothing: a red shirt, shorts. He shrugs. “I guess I’ll just get wet, then. I’ll dry off eventually.”

Julia sighs, dropping her hand away from her face, but she’s still smiling. “Anyone ever told you you’re about as bright as a black hole?”

“A couple,” Magnus responds. He stands up and turns to face her. “Should I start tossing rocks at you now?”

“You’ve already got my attention, mister Magnus. You don’t need to fight for everything.” She looks down at him almost pointedly, and neither of them say a word. Finally, Julia heaves another sigh. “Gods. Why don’t you come up here, Magnus?”

Magnus blinks up at her. “Uh. Up there? Me?” His boldness slips away from him just as easily as it came, and he balks at the notion of going to her. She rolls her eyes. “Alright, you big baby. Give me just a second.” With that, she disappears from the window. Magnus hardly waits a minute before he hears movement behind the door, the chain unlocking and the door opening up just a crack. Julia’s face pokes out just a bit. “Hey, there,” she says. She opens the door the rest of the way, and Magnus’s mind falls away from his body. She looks so beautiful, her hair frizzy and dressed in a soft blue nightgown that matches the bond between them. He freezes.

“...Hey,” he finally manages to say. He can’t look away from her.

“Shake the stars outta your eyes there, mister Magnus. We’ve gotta get you inside.”

“Why?” He’s already taking her hand and letting himself be pulled inside. Julia is just as strong as she looks. She smiles at him for the last moment he can see before they’re plunged into darkness. “Because I ain’t letting you sleep in my room if you’re gonna be all wet.”

Magnus barely has time to sputter in response before Julia is tugging him through the darkness, through a second door and into the back room where Magnus has only been a handful of times. He’s not thinking about any of that, though; he’s thinking about the feeling of her hand in his, the rough of her fingertips curled around his palm and the soft of the tiny hairs on her knuckles. She guides him up the stairs, into an unfamiliar house that is caught in moonlight through the window. Beyond that, Magnus sees everything, sees tables linked to chairs linked to cushions, picture frames with a tiny girl in them, big brown eyes and curly hair in a mop. Julia notices Magnus looking at one of those and give him a sharp tug away. “Quick, now,” she says, only half-scolding. “My room is this way.” They turn a sharp corner down a hallway and just as quick come to a door hanging ajar. She holds a finger to her lips and pushes it open. Magnus steps in before her upon her prompting, and Julia flicks on a lamp to chase away the dark. Magnus stands and stares.

Julia’s room is spectacularly her. There are books laid open on each flat surface, wood shavings dotting the carpet. Long-dead flowers rest in a vase on her dresser, next to a wooden carving of a duck.

“Hey,” he says. “I gave you that.”

“You did,” Julia teases. “And of course I kept it. It’s a real nice duck, you know.” They fall silent in the wake of her smile, and Magnus looks around the room a bit more. Pictures of her with unfamiliar people, with a younger Steven. Charcoal drawings lay strewn across her desk, sketches of hands and plants and eyes, one with a very familiar scar across it. Magnus decides not to ask about that, but he knows it’s him. He smiles to himself until finally, Julia breaks the silence by flopping down onto the floor.

“Well,” she says. “Tell me what happened with Kalen.”

“Huh?” Magnus turns to look at her, and she’s crossed her arms, head tilted to the side. “Don’t play dumb. You don’t just go walking out to the shop every night.” He raises an eyebrow. “Have you been looking?”

“I stargaze sometimes. Quit deflecting, and come sit down.” She pats the ground beside herself. Magnus complies easily, and sits close enough that their knees touch.

“He kicked me out,” Magnus says. And that’s all he says before tears are rushing to his eyes, threatening to spill over. His gut clenches uncertainly, and he wipes at them. “Fuck-” The tears don’t retreat, but don’t quite flow either. He brushes them away. Kalen has been growing away from him for a long time now, for months, and even despite that the realization hurts. Julia watches him cry with her wide, gentle eyes, and doesn’t move until he mutters, “Sorry.”

“Oh, Magnus…” she breathes, and she takes him into her arms. His tears stop coming just as quickly as they came, and his heart stutters. This is different than their hugs before. It’s tender, and it’s warm, almost loving. It’s enough to heal what Kalen damaged just an hour or two ago.

“Listen to me,” she says, her voice echoing in her chest as his ear is pressed to it. “Kalen’s a good-for-nothing. I’m sorry I ever stuck you with him. I just didn’t know what else to do. When I found you, you were...” She trails off. “I just didn’t know what to do,” she repeats, softer this time.

“Kalen’s a good guy,” Magnus defends. “He really is. He’s just… he just needs somebody to look after him. To protect him.” He sits up away from her begrudgingly, wanting to look at her more than to be against her. He smiles weakly. “And I guess I was supposed to be that person.”

Julia gives him a look of almost disbelief, but her eyes are soft. She returns his smile with the same gentleness. “You really think that’s your job, Magnus? Because it’s not.” He shakes his head. “I want to protect everyone I can.” Julia keeps looking at him with those soft eyes, her head tilted just slightly, and she sighs softly. “Let me tell you a story about Kalen, Magnus,” she says, and that’s all the warning she gives.

-

Governor Kalen, formerly known as Reese Lee Cortlandt, was born in the town of Raven’s Nest, a subset of Raven’s Roost that has long since been abandoned. He was the third born to his parents in a family that reeked of new money and city air. The Cortlandts were new to Raven’s Roost, and the townsfolk weren’t always as friendly to outsiders as they are now. Raven’s Roost was, in general, a closed community, and so for his first ten years, Reese was shunned, bullied, ridiculed. All he had to fall back on were other dishonest who clung to him like leeches, sucking money and resources away from him in return for the promise of a friend.

When Reese was eleven, he was sent up the flagpole in the center of town in the middle of the night. He stayed there for six hours until his father himself came and angrily pulled him down. His father scolded him for smearing the Cortlandt name.

When Reese was twelve, he tried to run away. All he took was the clothes on his back and a dagger he stole from a town vendor. He made it as far as Neverwinter before the militia caught him.

When Reese turned thirteen, he took up the flute and bought his way into a bardic college. He didn’t study particularly hard - Reese wasn’t the most studious of children - but he learned enough to punish those who harmed him. To those who once turned his back on him, he was ruthless, or at least as ruthless as a mere child could be. He wasn’t interested in what a bardic lifestyle could do for his charisma, or how he could form friendships. Reese was to the point of no return with his anger; it festered in him, swelling and growing until there was no logical solution but to release it.

There were incidents. Plenty of them, enough to incriminate anyone, and it wasn’t long before everyone knew it was him. He was the one casting Minor Illusion to create long shadows of strangers down the hall, the one using Prestidigitation to soil the clothes of other children and the one using Unseen Servant to attack those who once hurt him on a whim. There were never severe injuries or damage sustained, but Reese’s antics quickly became enough for him to be thrown out of the school system by the old governor. It was done for the safety of the other children, he said. They couldn’t risk having Reese harm more people, they said. And that was when Reese decided to change things. That was when he created Kalen.

Kalen was nothing like Reese because Kalen was a good boy. Kalen took walks down the streets of Raven’s Roost with a smile on his face, holding the hand of the Waxman daughter. Julia knew the whole time who he was - Reese’s dyed hair made very little difference, and she could see streaks of obvious gingery brown still poking through in places - but she was willing to pretend with him. She knew how loneliness ached, and she never got the little brother she wanted after all, and she knew what Kalen went through. She was never the target of his wrath as it was, and no one else seemed to acknowledge that he was Reese. And so she let him be Kalen instead.

The other Cortlandts, along with a fair amount of others living in the town of Raven’s Nest, perished soon after in what was deemed accidental house fire. Julia pretended she didn’t vomit when Kalen was the only one to survive, somehow making it outside. She once considered the possibility that it was him, that Kalen exacted revenge again and won this time, and then she found herself vomiting again. With a good portion of Raven’s Nest burned away in that fire, the folks still living there moved to the quickly growing housing corridor of Raven’s Roost. That was eleven years ago now.

With Kalen alone, Steven begrudgingly took him in upon Julia’s request. Julia made him take care of Kalen. She made him promise not to ever call him Reese again.

From there, Kalen grew up fast and he grew up mean. He still walked the streets with Julia, but he did it with his knuckles cracked and ready. There was no need. The children never bothered Kalen like they did Reese, because Kalen was good where Reese was not. Kalen was smart and handsome and charming, with just enough money left over from his family’s wealth to pay his way into anything he wanted, including Goldcliff University. And so he went off to college at sixteen, came back at twenty just slightly taller, his hair longer and his eyes older. He quickly started his bid for governor under the assumed name of Kalen, and with just a little help and promotion from the Waxman family, he won.

Kalen quietly accused the old governor of using magic for disruptive and sinister purposes. His choices were to be hanged, or to leave town immediately. That was the last Raven’s Roost saw of him.

On the same side of town that Magnus came in on, just a bit farther out, stands a headstone for each member of the Cortlandt family, Reese Lee included.

-

Magnus is quiet as Julia finishes. Hardly a sentence has parted her lips without a choked word or two.

“So, that’s Kalen,” Julia says. “That’s why he’s… the way he is, you know.” She waves a hand vaguely. “So clingy, I guess.”

Magnus blinks down at the floor. “He doesn’t seem too attached to you.”

“That’s because I cut him off, Magnus. I didn’t have no choice in it. He was just…” She sighs. “He was too much for me.” She shakes her head. “I don’t wanna keep talking sob stories, please. Can’t we talk about something nicer?”

“Okay,” Magnus says. “Where’s your dogs?”

Julia laughs, rolling her eyes fondly. “They’re out back for the night. I could get ‘em, but it’d almost certainly wake papa up.” Magnus considers this for a moment, and then decides that he definitely doesn’t want Steven to find him in his daughter’s bedroom late at night, especially after assuring him that they were only friends. He feels himself reddening, and there’s a stutter to his voice when he says, “I think we’re good.”

Julia smiles at him in that kind way she does, and then her eyes look past him, out to the window. They light with fascination as she says, “Look. Raindrops.” And surely enough, they can hear the faint pitter-patter of water splashing at the glass panes, and beyond that a bolt of lightning strikes the far off ground. For a moment, the world is caught in brilliant white, and the sight almost reminds Magnus of something.

He turns back to Julia. She’s still smiling. “First rain of the season,” she says. “S’posed to be the hardest it’s rained in years.” She nudges him. “Think that’s got anything to do with you showing up here?”

“What can I say,” Magnus replies. “I just seem to have that effect.”

Next comes a long moment in which they stare at each other, and something seems to fall into place. There is a peaceful silence inside of Magnus where there has always been a clamor before.

“You should stay the night,” she says quietly, something she’s repeatedly implied but not yet said. Magnus shakes his head. “A little bit of rain won’t kill me, Jules. I dunno if Steven would like that.”

“You take the bed,” she continues, completely ignoring him and standing up. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“Absolutely not.” Magnus stands to match her height as best he can, just an inch or two short. “If I’m sleeping here, I’ll take the floor.”

“You are sleeping here. Get on the bed, dummy.” She gives him a shove with a surprising amount of force behind it, and Magnus goes tumbling back against the bed, tripping and falling onto it. Julia leans over him and grins.

“Stay there,” she says, and even with the playful tone in her voice Magnus knows it to be a command. He does as she says, scooting just a little backwards so that he’s not hanging off quite so much. She crosses her arms, victorious.

“Now get to sleep,” she says. “And toss me a blanket.”

He takes one of the many multi-colored blankets off of her bed and hands it to her politely. She wraps it around her shoulders. “Thanks,” she says, a yawn caught up in her word. She lies down, and it isn’t long before her breaths become smooth and fluid, in and out like a tide on the shore.

Magnus listens for a while and tries to sleep. When he can’t, he crawls out of this bed that smells like Julia - a lovely combination of a cake batter-like lacquer smell and drying flowers - and onto the floor. He gently moves his hands beneath her, lifts her, and places her in her bed. She stirs, of course, but not much. She sighs contently, rolls over and starts to snore softly. Magnus takes the blanket he gave to her and balls it up beneath his head, and slowly falls asleep to the sounds of a storm brewing.

-

When he wakes in the morning, Julia is gone.

He comes to slowly, blearily, his mind fighting to remember where he is. The window is open a touch, and the world outside smells like earth. It grounds him, and he remembers Kalen. He remembers Julia. He remembers most everything.

Outside, he hears muffled conversation, a light voice and then a gruff one in reply, and he realizes that must be Julia talking to Steven. Upon this realization, he tries to tune out, but slivers still slip through.

“It’s not his fault. Kalen…”

“You still should’ve told me before…”

“...didn’t _do_ anything, papa, just…”

The conversation carries on just like that for some time, pieces drifting in and out of Magnus’s ears. He’s fairly sure they’re talking about him. If they are, then he’s not sure he’s too excited to go out judging by Steven’s tone. He sits on the edge of Julia’s bed and tries to direct his focus to the world outside the window, how the sun in pouring in golden streams through blankets of clouds and the smell of rain on the wood of the house and the metal of axes in the backyard. The scent sinks into his bones, into his soul, awakens a sort of easy happiness inside him. Something good is associated with that smell. He can’t imagine what it is, but the effect is nice regardless.

The door swings open. Julia, still in her nightgown, looks almost holy hit from behind with morning light. A painting of a saint, she floats into the room and puts her hand on Magnus’s shoulder. Her lips are pressed together tightly.

“Come on out,” she says. “You gotta talk to papa eventually.” Magnus’s gut flips, but he follows her gentle tugging out to the front room which he’s never seen in full light before. Steven is standing, arms crossed next to the stairs that lead back to the shop.

“Magnus,” he says, and then beckons him closer. Magnus hunches his shoulders and complies. He’s prepared for the worst, really. He’s prepared for Steven to yell at him at least, or to kick him out again at worst. He understands Steven’s protectiveness to an extent; of course, Julia is his only child, but she’s also extremely competent and capable of making her own decisions. If you were to ask Magnus, he’d say Julia can have however many men she wants in her room at night, but then that thought makes him sort of heartsick and sorrowful and he just winds up confused. He pushes this all aside as he stops in front of Steven and readies his apology. He’s already expecting anything he could throw at him.

What Magnus doesn’t expect is Steven to swing a hand down onto his shoulder, clapping him almost playfully. He smiles a sort of sympathetic smile that Magnus recognizes from Julia’s face. “I understand ‘bout Kalen,” he says. “He can be a real tool.” He lifts his hand, leaving Magnus stunned in place. Julia jostles him from behind. In the time it took him to walk sullenly to Steven, she left and dressed for the day.

“C’mon, mister Magnus. Work don’t go away just ‘cause you got kicked out.” She pushes past him to the stairs, shooting a smile over her shoulder at him as she exits. Magnus gapes after her, and then turns to Steven. “I’m happy to work, sir,” he says, his voice unsteady. “But I, uh. I don’t have anywhere to stay?” It comes out a question, and Steven doesn’t answer. He points down the stairs. “Go to work, Magnus. We’ll talk later.” Magnus is pretty sure he knows better than to argue.

While they’re busy chopping logs out back, Magnus reveals his worry to Julia as well. She laughs at him outright.

“Don’t be silly, mister Magnus.”

“I’m not being silly,” Magnus counters, swinging his axe as hard as he can. A log splits in two.

“You are,” Julia replies, half sing-song. She makes a sizeable dent in her own log.

“I’m _not,_ ” Magnus argues. Julia rolls her eyes, sets her axe down and wipes her forehead. She puts on an exasperated show, but Magnus knows her well enough to see the smile in her eyes as she says, “Don’t you get it, Magnus? You’re home _now._ ” She punches him in the chest at half strength, because they figured out that’s the softest she can go without definite bruising. The bond between them swells, overflows, spills out in blue light that puddles on the ground. Everything is so bright around Julia.

Magnus rubs at the place where she hit him and he smiles. He thinks he understands now.

Julia shakes her fist like she hurt it. “See?” she says. “Look at you, Magnus. You’ve already made it home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was the bane of my existence for so long.... writing steven waxman is hard. anyways i've always had a headcannon that steven was disabled because of a long-past fight that no one can remember (the relic wars) and that's why he hired magnus: his business was growing and his daughter wasn't enough help anymore. i know that's not how trav described him but. i do what i want.
> 
> also. that whole kalen backstory? i've always figured he had some connection to the waxman family. dunno why, but i did. so there it is.
> 
> anyways! thank you for reading, commenting, leaving kudos! it means so so much to me. all of you are the best.
> 
> im @dungeondyke on tumblr. this fic will probably be three more chapters, with one being just an epilogue. please keep reading and enjoying!


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